


The Murder

by rvst



Series: We Three Idiots [7]
Category: Carmilla (Web Series), Carmilla - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-21
Updated: 2016-01-30
Packaged: 2018-05-15 08:03:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5777794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rvst/pseuds/rvst
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The vampire wanted nothing more than to run away, leaving the bodies to their afterlives, be it crossing the Styx or facing Saint Peter. Strewn in between the very human bodies lay bits and pieces of those who had already died once side by side with harpy wings and flesh long gone rotten. Carmilla stayed perfectly still, as if this would change the reality behind her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The air was thick with the scent of death.

Carmilla hated it, the humidity of great groups of people and the sudden silence of a battle finished.

The vampire wanted nothing more than to run away, leaving the bodies to their afterlives, be it crossing the Styx or facing Saint Peter. Strewn in between the very human bodies lay bits and pieces of those who had already died once side by side with harpy wings and flesh long gone rotten. Carmilla stayed perfectly still, as if this would change the reality behind her.

No one had survived the battle, not the creatures, not the soldiers, not the leaders watching from afar. It had gone wrong on all sides immediately and Carmilla couldn't place why she knew all of this to be true and accurate. Scavenger birds circled above, occasionally diving to nip at an exposed limb or something shiny.

If Carmilla turned around then this would be just like every other dream she couldn't really remember in the morning. She would wake up in the closest she could be to a cold sweat and Laura would have to calm her down at great personal risk. The second time she stood on this battlefield Laura was thrown out of their bed, crashing into a mostly harmless pile of dirty clothes that never seemed to find their way off the floor.

The warmth underneath her body as she clung to Danny's neck, reassuring herself but not knowing why she need it, was soothing in a way that Laura couldn't be.

All Carmilla had to do was face the reality behind her, turn slowly and catch sight of red hair caked with darker red blood and a chest that was long since unmoving. Blood never tasted good per say, but the familiar kinds held a certain allure. The familiarity of the only person she regularly fed from sent her mouth dry as it begged to sate the unbearable thirst. Though it wasn't flowing, it was still warmed by the sun beating down on the deceased.

She squared her shoulders and closed her eyes. If she didn't look then it wasn't true, the everything was fine and they could both go home to Laura who would no doubt be worrying over them by now. The wind shifted as she turned to face the sun as it began the long descent to the horizon. A battle at high noon with no winners in sight. She kept her head tilted backward as her eyes opened, wanting to delay reality for a few moments longer.

A man stood on the hill among the dead commanders on the human side. It was a small comfort that familiar blood was stopped regardless of issuing orders from afar or leading by example up close, a very small comfort. The man shimmered like heat haze against a boiling highway. He didn't try to loot from the bodies, nor did he pay Carmilla herself any attention. In fact, he reminded her of a General overseeing the end of a battle well-won, though she was quite certain that no creature or human could possibly have their endgame met by useless loss of life.

The man grew tired of the dead men on the hill, and started the long journey to where the battle was the fiercest, where the panic was still heavy in the air and the dead were silent. She followed him with her eyes until red was creeping into sight. He became irrelevant, her legs pushing her forward without her permission.

The body was warmer than it had been during her previous visits, no longer the cold of the first time. Now the blood was heated still, almost drinkable. Carmilla swallowed heavily to clear the bile building in her throat though she couldn't place if it was want or famine causing it. Either way she was closer to the time of death than she had ever been before, the thought alone threatening to cave in her chest.

Stumbling, she reached the body surrounded by bodies that were everything but human, exactly as usual. The warrior took as many as humanly possible with her to the great darkness, succumbing to wound unseen. Carmilla liked to pretend she couldn't see holes in the standard issue military uniform nor the gash over the heart. It was easier this way, she told herself even as she fell to her knees next to the dead.

Carmilla went into her marriage knowing that the two women she was committing herself to were stubbornly human. They were going to leave her eventually, and she had decades to reconcile herself with this fact. Then the military came knocking and decades became years.

The man had vanished when she found the strength to drag her eyes away from the identifying patch on the body's uniform. He disappeared quietly, though she still felt the crawling sensation of being watched. Perhaps Mother had wormed her way out of Hell to torment her favourite pet child some more. The air now had a biting seaside chill to it, now that the heat of battle was long over.

Carmilla fell to her knees, clawing within her own heart to more bravery than she knew was there. Was there anyone left on the human side to collect the dead's tags?

Her hand was shaking as it reached out to confirm that the body was there, that it was real. She had to know for sure if she was going to lose a piece of her heart in a field she couldn't place in her long and well-travelled memory. The cold of her hand met the blood-warmed outer layer of protective material, fingers catching on the patch high on the frozen chest. Carmilla had to stop whatever precious little her stomach had in it, the name and rank told her she had failed, that she didn't deserve to live while the steadfast and true lay dead among the monsters she took with her.

'MAJ. D. HOLLIS,' the patch mocked up at her, without even an initial to confirm that she was connected forever to this woman. That their brief time together mattered and Carmilla wasn't condemned to face Laura with a flag foreign to both of her humans and pretend that this death wasn't in vain.

The creeping sensation of being watched flared as a cold fear pooled deep in her heart. Something, or someone, was coming and she needed to stop it, and she already knew that it would end up here. In a field, with a body, the only one of the multitudes of the dead that mattered to her.

Danny looked so peaceful, if Carmilla could force herself to ignore the darkness of sleep deprivation around her eyes and the blood splattered all along her neck, and porcelain pale as she lay frozen in time. Carmilla ran a hand through her dark hair, dotted with the occasional strand or two of grey. Support vehicles would be arriving soon, with plain plywood boxes and heavy machinery to dig mass-graves for those that weren't military. Carmilla had to decide what to do while her brain effectively shut down in the face of her lost love.

A part of her whispered words she had only heard twice in her long lifetime, the ones Mother said after the ball or in the grime of the port when she made her favoured child a playmate far more malleable than dear sweet Carmilla. She could say them and turn the decades she was promised and the years she was given into centuries.

Carmilla could spend decades at a time showing Jolly Red the world, each local restaurant that require years of living in the city to find, every last piece of art in all of France and Italy, and they could read every single book worth reading. If only they had the time.

A memory strained to be noticed at the edge of her dreams, one that she only knew existed in this place between her bed and Hell itself. Details wouldn't focus into view but she felt the conclusion, sealing her mouth against Mother's magical words that gave her a daughter and a son to use for bait while she used her power to exact her will on the population. The body was to remain silent and still.

The scavenger birds were done surveying the lay of the land. They swooped down one by one and began the long task of exposing bone to the air as quickly and methodically as possible. Come and get it while it's fresh, all you can eat buffet.

Carmilla stayed knelt, hands reaching to comfort although there could be none now, and waited for the sun to set.

She would wake when it rose, free from the horror yet again.

  
  


 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

  
Laura Hollis woke to her bed shaking.

No, not the bed, the other person in the bed was shaking. Laura kept a tight hold on the hundreds of questions that flew into her mind as Carmilla shivered as if she took a swim in liquid nitrogen. Her wife would tell her if and when she was ready and Laura could deal with that. Wary of previous mornings when Carmilla was coming to the end of her dreaming, Laura kept her distance and reached with a single hand to gently wake her troubled partner from whatever fresh Hell her subconscious was tormenting her with on this fine morning.

Most people would take waking to a lover in the midst of a nightmare as a sign of bad things to come but Laura Hollis felt that these people needed to hold their chins up higher and look for the brightness in the darkness.

Carmilla grumbled and groaned as she was pulled from her unpleasant sleep, the ungrateful brat, and Laura responded by poking her all the more.

"No," mumbled Carmilla, leaving Laura with a moment to be unsure if she was talking to the dream or the notion that her wife wanted her to be awake now, please. Laura smiled regardless of which.

"But darling, if you don't wake up, you might miss attaching yourself to Danny when she gets home," Laura pushed in a sugar-soaked voice reserved for annoying the vampire into doing what she wanted.

Carmilla let the blankets fall away from her head to crack open one bleary eye, glaring at her wife so hard Laura checked that her hair wasn't set on fire. "That's today?"

Laura threw her own share of the blankets off her body and swung her legs so she could stand. Carmilla's one open eye followed her movement with great interest. Laura rolled her eyes at the silly vampire and her overly obvious leering. Carmilla knew she had to get to work today, as much as potentially not being home to greet Danny when she finally got back from her officer's training hurt Laura. The slurred words were all kinds of adorable, and she let herself have a glance over her shoulder to figure how much of the bad dream had followed Carmilla into consciousness.

As per the recent trend of increasingly frequent nightmares, Laura noted that Carmilla didn't appear even touched by whatever was troubling her mind. Laura screwed her eyebrows together in thought.

"Were you having a bad dream just now?" Laura settled that she had to ask because there was no way she could deal with not knowing what was troubling her wife for even another minute. She wanted to help, and it had been an issue for long enough. Carmilla wouldn't face the reality of her hair needing brushing more than once per month, recurring nightmares being signs of something else were out of the question.

Carmilla struggled into a sitting position, glaring at the rising sun as if the heavens were moving just to spite her poor eyes. "I don't remember, probably," she slurred, running her hands through her hair and frowning when they both got quickly caught. Laura ducked into their en-suite bathroom and threw one of their nine hairbrushes at Carmilla's head. "Gee, thanks, love you too."

Laura leaned on the chipped wooden doorway, "take care of yourself, or I will do it for you."

Carmilla's face scrunched up with displeasure as she regarded the brush warily. "I don't think you've thought this through."

Sighing Laura let her head thump against the wood and set her partner with the sternest expression she could manage at dawn. Annoyed kittens came to Carmilla's mind for some totally unrelated reason. "Get the worst of it done and we'll negotiate later."

Humming happily, Carmilla decided this was a lot of work for one morning and fell back to get comfortable for her morning nap while leaving her head exposed so Laura didn't get any ideas about leaving before Carmilla got her morning kiss.

Twenty minutes later, Carmilla was dozing between sleep and consciousness, all memory of the battlefield gone. A warm hand grabbed at her jaw and then there was a very pleasant kiss to wake her back up.

"Love you too, please be awake when I get home," Laura murmured, filling Carmilla's senses with the scent of roses that followed Laura everywhere.

"I make no promises."

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

Fortuitous Superstition was in the top three strangest names for a local newspaper in the Styrian area. It was sitting in third, but Laura liked saying top three because the other two publications were too weird even for her.

Laura had no desire to ever, ever meet a Screaming Minotaur, forget about one that was literate enough to run a newspaper.

She drove to work in her environmentally-friendly car that was too small for Danny to consider driving. It took the better part of an hour to get to the rustic two-storey early 20th century house that she spent three months and an outrageous amount of money converting to a fully modernised office, complete with basement printing facilities, all while keeping the facade intact for the local community authorities. Laura hadn't argued with such intensity while she was at university and attempting to reason with all manner of unhappy sentient creatures, from vampires to harpies via mushrooms and some very lost wendigos. Local home owners were nothing to sneeze at.

Laura didn't consciously question the parking structure that had appeared only three blocks away one day a few weeks before they officially moved in, but left the multi-storey building each morning with a prickling sensation on the back of her neck that faded before she fully noticed it was there.

The walk was short but gave her time to shift from a loving partner and friend to the kind of person who would use her close contact with the local military units to get every drop of information about a story without a second thought. That particular surprisingly mature discussion had happened with her and Danny in the middle of the Silas baseball field with half a bottle of whisky the morning of Laura's graduation. Carmilla was not pleased with her stumbling intendeds'.

The front door was pulled to but not locked. Getting keys cut and keeping track of them seemed like a bit much for a small paper that generally didn't take sides in any given argument, most of the time anyway. Laura could hear the rustling of a new day starting as she walked up the short path between the road and their door.

Pushing open the stained glass angular shapes of the door decorations, Laura was pleased to see the day's potential stories and a full staff availability report was sitting on the small table placed just inside the doorway. The staff were all aware of the boss' cheery morning attitude was mostly an act and badgering her while not being either the army wife or the unspecified supernatural creature wife tended to go horribly wrong for whoever dared interrupt the Hollis Monster before she had her bearings for the working day ahead.

Greg had nearly been fired on nine separate occasions for tempting Fate in the morning. The paper was only just approaching its first anniversary, most other staff members were running a betting pool for when she would snap and either fire him or ask one of the wives to quietly disappear him.

Laura checked the printout of recent suspicious crimes and flagged Greg on her way to her office at the back of the house. He wasn't where he was supposed to be, upstairs at his own desk, so she felt that he could take the worst job for the day. Greg audibly swallowed, throwing his shoulders back to give the appearance of bravery when faced with his intimidating boss.

She threw her stuff on the armchair nominally there for interviewing people, and indulged in falling into her rolling desk chair and letting it fly back before pulling herself into a more professional appearance before Greg trailed in behind her like a man walking to the gallows.

"Morning, boss," he greeted flatly, she appreciated it when they were honest about how terrible mornings are. "Please not another potential pack of demon goats, I've only just got the smell out of my hair."

Laura let him stand there and stew in her potentially bad mood for a while as she set out her morning folder in order of importance. The piece on the vampire family up north would not be front page stuff, they had specifically requested this placement and Laura knew what a vampire open to being convinced otherwise looked like. The day was looking like it was going to run itself, leaving her open for editing work, planning field reports, and choosing what to wear for when Danny came home from the Initiative.

Laura frowned, reminding herself for the umpteenth time that Danny didn't like it being called that. Greg shifted his weight from foot to foot, forcing himself to keep his arms folded and perfectly still. The smell of goat reached his nose and he resisted groaning.

"They were demon goats, it was a halfway decent article," she dismissed his complaint in the only language he understood, backhanded compliments. "Three hours westward, an apparently suspicious homicide in an apartment building. No details aside from 'strange' so call the locals ahead so you don't waste six hours of my time driving there and back."

She placed the bare bones preliminary report on the edge of her desk, forcing him to come retrieve it. Laura had never had a grown man leap away from her before, and wasn't sure she liked the feeling.

"They haven't even identified the victim yet?"

Laura scanned the hand-written sheet of writing at the very top of her morning briefing pile. "The family requested his name be kept from the press. If it didn't say white male, I'd think he was a werewolf."

Greg raised his eyebrows but didn't ask what that had to do anything out loud. Laura rolled her eyes, she should make the entire contents of their paper mandatory reading for everyone. Greg would know her reasoning if he had done so.

"Almost every werewolf was hunted down and killed for their pelts by some offshoot branch of vampire overlord cult-types except for a couple packs of really ancient bloodlines, split fairly evenly between strongholds in Spain and Portugal. Vampires can make more vampires real quick, werewolves have to make more of their kind the old fashioned way."

"Religious fanaticism?" Laura resisted the urge to stab Greg with her pure silver letter-opener that she kept for potential vampire attacks. The shotgun was for basically everything else. Greg, by some miracle, picked up on her sudden switch from annoyed to angry. "Not that, sorry."

Laura took a deep breath. "I meant by having kids," she clarified through her clenched teeth. "If you ever come across someone you think is a werewolf, pretend to speak a different language so you aren't the victim of a justifiable homicide. Those are a thing, my wife was charged and freed over one."

Greg visibly paled, especially since his boss didn't specify which wife. Was it the one who was with the government, or was it the vampire that would probably see him as a distasteful lunch. "I'll see what they can tell me over the phone then report back before I leave?"

She glared at him until he backed out of her office. He didn't want to show his back to her and kind of wanted to bow as he left.

Laura leaned back in her chair and rubbed the last remnants of sleep out of her eyes.

It was going to be a long day.

 

 

* * *

 

 

  
Laura's office at work was smaller than her one at home. It didn't have the delicately painted walls Carmilla did for her, nor did it have the carefully crafted desk Danny had made with some help from Kirsch. The thin door didn't block out noise like the oak masterpiece at home, and there was a sizable gap between the bottom of the door and the floor. She could hear every phone ringing, every argument over whose turn it was to add paper into the photocopier, and most of the avid speculations about where a newly-graduated journalism major got the money to buy not one, but two sizable houses and the practical yet not-cheap car she drove.

She had quietly decided two things. Firstly, she was never letting anyone know that she could hear everything on the bottom floor of the converted house. Second, she would have to work on some way to boil down the twisted will the Dean had left behind and how that translated to a reasonable large fortune that Carmilla was determined to burn through as quickly as humanly possible.

Laura was genuinely shocked last week when her vampire wife decided to start a bonfire and didn't fuel the flames with paper money.

The wave of silence that swept through her company's offices was immediately noticeable to Laura. She didn't hear the cause of the problem, but the last thing she clearly heard was Greg arriving back from the suspicious homicide she had sent him on earlier in the day. Laura closed her laptop after saving the article surrounding the Spanish werewolf pack that Danny had informed her were in the country she was working on all day.

The shuffling of people to escape an uncomfortable situation was a very distinct sound. Laura spent the weeks leading up to Danny being attacked by werewolves with people scrambling to avoid being around her and her two suitors that she simply couldn't choose between. The scared students and professors didn't stop until she sent out a video update from Danny's hospital bedside with them both openly staring at Laura dreamily.

Footsteps along their hardwood flooring slowly approached her door. Laura regarded them warily, nothing good came with the deathly silence spreading to the upper floor of their headquarters. She startled when two short knocks shattered the silent calm that set her teeth on edge.

"Boss?" Greg's annoying-ass voice filtered through the thin door. "I have my report from the scene, you got a minute?"

While he did sound roughly as irritating as ever, there was a serious edge to his words. Laura called for him to enter, curious by this new side of her employee.

Greg looked like crap, and Laura was being generous with her initial impression. She motioned for him to sit in one of the uncomfortable chairs she had bought for whenever one of her less savoury subjects of interest agreed to come in and submit to her questioning. The average looking man collapsed in the seat unprofessionally, tossing the folder he was holding onto her already cluttered desk. Greg had a drawn look to his face, like he had aged a full decade in the six hours since she had ordered him out of the office so she didn't strangle him.

He rubbed his face with both hands and took a deep breath to steady himself. When he finally looked her in the eyes, she considered asking him if he had been drinking. She tried her best to force an uneasy smile onto her mouth which Greg responded to by a sudden terror shining through his eyes.

"What's up, Greg?" Laura prompted, correctly assuming that he wasn't going to speak first. "Succubus attack? Evil mermaids?"

"They aren't willing to settle on a cause of death," he avoided with a depressed monotone. "That's not why I want to report in person."

Laura felt her chest tighten in a panic. Her brain struggled to get her racing heart under control as panic jumped her thoughts to Danny or Carmilla being killed with no clear cause.

Danny was no doubt getting into her overly-threatening military vehicle to drive home to Laura and Carmilla. The murder happened in the early hours of the morning, right when Carmilla was crawling into bed to have a worrying nightmare that Laura frowned thinking about. They were safe. The victim was a fairly young white guy, neither of them were that.

"Do you remember that opening party you held at your house when we started the paper?" Greg asked, his bloodshot eyes staring off into a million miles of nothing. "You probably don't, your wife found some kind of super scotch and you said it tasted just like honey."

That was all Laura remembered from that night, and she reminded herself to get Danny's source for the fantastic drink. It was probably Kirsch, last Laura heard he was off setting up a micro-brewery and making a mint off the profits.

"I don't drink, and I was driving anyway so I remember all of it, you have some really weird, really cool friends," Greg continued. Laura let herself relax, memories of the very warm night she'd had after the party was over. "There was this guy who I'm pretty sure had rocks in his head, but really nice kind of dude."

Laura nodded along, letting the one night Danny and Kirsch didn't find something to one-up each other over wash over her with the close warmth of the family she had built for herself. Danny complained a couple of weeks after the 'wedding' that she didn't really want a brother, and yet Laura insisted on being friends with the Zeta idiot. Her mind was calming down from the stress of worrying about her wives', she missed the right details in the panic. Greg's words didn't reach the logical functions of her brain.

"We had a few truly spectacular brews, swapped frat stories, did not know your wife was a sorority sister by the way, and he was by far the least strange of all your school friends," he finished his thought, leaning back in the chair. Laura's face twisted into confusion. "I'm sorry, Boss. They have no idea what happened beyond 'there was a struggle' and 'it's clearly not suicide'. Emergency services were called when the crashing started."

Greg then had to pull out his pocket notebook, flipping through the pages as Laura's hand wandered to her mobile phone sitting on her desk without her being totally aware of the movement. Danny wouldn't be driving yet, and she was known to pull over no matter what to answer if it was Laura or Carmilla calling.

"They think the guy escaped on foot but that's only from witnesses and it's a fairly generic description. The cops and the ambulance arrived within a reasonable time frame and there was nothing either could do. The coroner arrived after the paramedics were, uh, satisfied that the," Greg paused to push his floppy hair back as Laura gripped her phone tightly, "wounds were too extensive and they had done everything they could do. The coroner declared it at the scene."

The name of the small city she sent him to that morning swam into her stream of thought, heart clenching unpleasantly. She needed to call Danny before she heard from someone else. Laura prompted Greg to continue with his report, professionalism taking over from her own feelings and concerns.

"Local law enforcement and the local press wouldn't let me in the scene, or even the damn apartment building. Whatever happened in there, they don't want anyone seeing it. I'm thinking some kind of signature or maybe they don't want pictures leaking out to the press."

"Greg," Laura interrupted him softly, her confusion settling into whatever comforting empathy she could possibly muster. He looked like a man who spent the better part of his day sitting in a car and focusing with a brief break for some horror in between long driving sessions. She'd seen the look on Danny's face after she lost a Summer Sister to the werewolves that nearly killed her too, it wasn't a pleasant memory and Laura was apparently going to make a new one. "Please, he's-"

Greg watched his boss swallow her own urge to cry, wondering what the heck she went through before he met her to give her that cold, hard look in the face of tragedy. He couldn't stop his own flood of emotion, as he couldn't for most of the drive back to work. Greg had to pull over no less than seven times on the return journey to re-compose himself. "Victim is a white male in his twenties," he stopped as his breath hitched.

"Leave the report and go home for the day," Laura ordered gently, with a sharp edge halting any protest he may have had. Greg stared at her with dead eyes as the folder containing his report crumpled in his squeezing hands. "Stop at that bar you live near and have exactly one beer, then go straight to bed."

Greg let the report fall onto her desk and shuffled out of the room in a haze, following her commands without thinking to challenge them.

Laura waited until he was completely out of the converted house, the door banging against its frame from the overly tight hydraulics, and stood to close and lock her office door. The folder beckoned and she knew someone had to read it, had to tell everyone else what was inside of it. The deadbolt on her office was a wise choice by Danny when they were going through the plans for the paper, Laura silently thanked her wife and ignored the fresh clench of her heart at the phone call she would have to make once she was done reading.

Her bones were like lead and mercury flowed sluggishly through her veins, but she dragged herself back into her chair and set to work writing out a game plan.

The folder was a mess, Greg had rushed it and it certainly showed. Laura noted on a neon sticky-note that she wasn't going to reprimand him for that. She read through it four times to make sure the information sunk into her brain properly. This was a case study that she couldn't afford to get wrong.

Scrawled across the front in that ridiculous permanent marker Greg carried with him was five words:

Suspicious homicide. Victim: Wilson Kirsch.


	2. Chapter 2

Danny had switched her voicemail from her usual bland greeting to a sheepish declaration that her phone was about to die and, she claimed, her cat had destroyed all of the chargers she owned. Laura smiled despite herself, glad that Carmilla wasn't really one to actually call either of them ever. Laura acutely remembered when the second voicemail greeting was recorded, Danny was right, Carmilla's more animal form had destroyed the cables by accidentally knocking the box they were in into their at the time brand new fireplace. Danny never seemed especially keen on re-recording it, so the incident would live on in infamy until someone let slip to Carmilla. Then Danny's phone would join its original set of chargers in the fires of time.

Plan B then, Laura thought as she leafed through Greg's report for the thirty-ninth time in half an hour. She called Carmilla, knowing that not even her semi-nocturnal wife could still be asleep this late in the day.

Carmilla picked up after three rings, her voice huffing and puffing like she'd forgotten that she could instantly transport herself, again.

"Hey, Cupcake, how can I be of service this fine afternoon?"

Laura's stomach flipped then recoiled as she remembered why she was calling. "I'm very happy that your herbs are doing what you want them to today but I need a favour, one you aren't going to love," Laura asked all in one go, her chest burned for a few moments by it knew what it signed up for when she was born and there was no use complaining now.

Carmilla was immediately serious. "What's up? You sound like you're about to cry."

Laura grinned, letting exactly one tear fall. "I am, can you go to Danny and give her your phone?"

There was a rustling on Carmilla's end of the call, then it abruptly ended. Laura stared at the 'Call Ended' displaying on her screen in awe that her wife had hung up on her. It started buzzing and Carmilla's face popped up before she could get over the shock.

"What the Hell, Carm?"

The other end of the line now sounded like it was out in windy weather rather than the still tranquillity of their home. "The route I take to get from one place to another isn't exactly great on human ears. Also, Danny nearly ran me over," Carmilla explained, rushing the accusation to Danny's protests in the background. "I did not randomly appear in the middle of the street, she's lying."

There was a brief scuffle as they fought over the phone and whose version of the truth was the right one. Laura let herself laugh, Carmilla had the oddest ways of dealing with her partners' when they were sad. Carmilla must have let Danny win, as she spoke next into Carmilla's phone.

"Why did I nearly pancake Elvira?" Danny was breathless as she recovered from whatever form of wrestling they were trying this month. "Are you okay?"

Laura swallowed heavily and wished that she could dive head first into the old bottle of whisky sitting in the bottom drawer of her desk. Her damn car had to get home somehow and she felt that it might be the last time alone for the next few days. "I have some bad news and I need you to get home as fast as you can drive, okay?"

"I'm heading back to work for an emergency meeting, they wouldn't tell me what then my phone died," Danny said, panic creeping into her voice. The wind kicked up and Laura missed whatever Carmilla said next. "And she's gone, I guess this is my phone now."

"They're going to keep you another night, aren't they?" Laura knew what she was getting herself into when she agreed to marry Danny. The reality of having one of her partners' lives being dictated by her superiors rather than her own free will strained her heart at times like these. Laura wanted nothing more than to curl up in Danny's arms and Special Forces orders were going to delay that by at least a day, probably more. When Danny didn't respond, Laura sighed. "Call me before you go in? You'll want to hear this from me and I don't want you driving after."

"Are you alright?" Danny asked again, a steely and dark determination coming through her voice causing a shiver to roll down Laura's spine. "You need to tell me if you aren't, it's in your vows and everything."

"I'll be okay, you really need to get back there and push them into investigating," Laura stopped the worrying before it could gain traction. "I'm heading home, I'll see you tomorrow?"

"I'll be there even if it kills me," she declared, far happier than Laura thought she herself could muster. "Call me when you get home?"

"Of course," Laura promised, disconnecting the call and gathering her things to leave. She passed her assistant editor and told the poor woman that she would be doing Laura's work for at least the next day, possibly longer.

The drive home seemed to take an age.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

If Danny or Laura died, Carmilla would be beside herself for months if not years. She would feel horrible if one of the gingers went out unexpectedly, and the lovely gentleman at the local hardware/gardening store would be a somewhat emotional loss.

The frat boy with a crush on Danny? Not so much.

Though she recognised the sadness associated with any loss of life, it didn't bother her on a personal level. Not directly.

Laura didn't say anything when she arrived home, choosing instead to give Carmilla a crumpled report to speak for itself. She then poured herself a sizable glass of scotch and sat across from their fireplace, getting lost in the crackling logs of wood Carmilla had spent the day carefully tending and monitoring. The words all made sense to the vampire, she understood and didn't feel anything one way or the other. What she did feel was the urge to make whatever had Laura silent go away, that one hurt.

The dumb-ass got himself murdered and now Carmilla had to pretend she cared for Laura's sake. She left the report on their kitchen table and wandered to the living room in search of her muted wife. Danny had called their home phone when it was official that her personal leave was definitely delayed until tomorrow, leaving Carmilla with the comforting the grieving Laura job that she was wholly unsuited to doing.

She stopped in the doorway, observing Laura as she stared into the fire. The blank expression more than anything unsettled Carmilla. Laura's face wasn't set to neutral when she was asleep, it didn't have an off setting, like ever. The scotch was drained in two mouthfuls, the vampire cheering silently as Laura didn't reach for a second helping.

"Do you," Carmilla had to pause as Laura's attention snapped to her with an intensity that she hadn't seen since Silas. Carmilla swallowed the lump of fear crawling up her throat before finishing her question, "need anything?"

The firelight flickered in Laura's eyes, making her all the more intimidating. Carmilla resisted her flight reflex as it urged her to get away from the clear and present threat sitting before her. Laura blinked twice and stared at Carmilla like she was only just registering that her wife was in the room. "Sorry, what?"

Carmilla ventured into the room proper and perched herself on the edge of the couch well away from Laura, lest she be bitten by the determined zeal she knew from experience was just around the corner. "Is there anything I can do?"

Laura's features softened as she placed her glass of ice on the coffee table. Frowning at how far away her wife was, Laura opened her arms wide and giggled when Carmilla dove into them with an enthusiasm generally reserved for food and sleep.

Carmilla didn't question why her being held was something that could help, but gift horses, mouths, and all that good junk.

"They won't let anyone see the scene and Danny's bosses want her opinion on something all of a sudden," Laura spoke with a low tone, talking to herself as much as she was to Carmilla. "They literally recruited Danny because of her time at Silas, there's no way they don't know about her connections to Kirsch."

Snuggling closer to Laura and tucking herself into her neck, Carmilla was proud of her Cupcake saying his name without her voice breaking or anything. "They might think she did it?"

Laura's breathing stopped for a moment. Carmilla could hear her brain racing through a thousand different plans to kidnap Danny from the base's on-site containment facility. There was no way Danny would do it, she'd only ever killed one person and even Kirkland wasn't exactly her fault.

"It's probably background stuff," Laura eventually decided, no doubt halfway through planning the distraction phase of breaking Danny out of jail, "did he have any enemies? Connections to the supernatural? Long lost evil twin?"

Carmilla raised her head to mock-glare at her wife, "evil twin is going a bit far. Aside from me and my dearly departed brother, the idiot was totally separate from my side of the world."

"So he had two fairly big connections then?" Laura asked rhetorically. Carmilla did not like the creeping uncertainty to her words, it sounded like the beginnings of guilt. "I mean, Will entrenched himself in the Zetas, but he wouldn't have had extended contact with you and the more than usual Silas weirdness if I didn't keep asking him for help. God, I even asked Danny to use his feelings for her that one, really, really desperate time," Laura babbled.

Carmilla let her go on, she needed to work through any kind of guilt she had before she was in any shape to Nancy Drew the heck out of this problem. Carmilla knew her humans, Laura processed before charging in head first, Danny crushed herself under the details after she'd already done the stupid, heroic thing. It was sending her grey, to be honest.

"He forgave you for that little incident, if I recall correctly," Carmilla tried to sooth some of the guilt. Any vestige of Laura's cold examination of the problem was gone. "And he was your best dude that one time you tried to kill Danny and burn me at the stake."

"I totally would have won if you didn't break my ribs via dead horse," her wife argued automatically. Then she flushed red. "This is why my dad thinks we aren't in the healthiest of relationships."

Carmilla groaned out her annoyance. "He only gets an opinion because he's the only halfway decent parent we have between the three of us," she argued, not liking the dismay on her wife's face. "In my experience, you're a sad crier, what's different?"

"I don't know," Laura answered after an uncomfortably long pause. "I'm devastated but," she slid into truly terrible posture, leaning into Carmilla for strength, "all I can think about is making sure the mother fucker is caught and that this never happens again."

The vampire only heard Laura like this once before, and she was cursed at the time. "It might be a random thing, people sometimes just get killed for no reason."

Laura's loose grip around her waist tightened, a low rumble working its way through her chest. Carmilla ducked back down to hide from the fallout from her somewhat callous words. Her wife didn't seem like she was going to attack, though she did take one almighty deep breath in.

"It can't be random, the police won't say anything and they won't even let the local papers in the damn building. They generally don't do that kind of crap if there isn't something bigger going on. Like a serial killer or a group of monsters rolling into town. I refuse to believe that the Special fucking Forces are calling back their supernatural kind of expert for a random murder!"

Laura's chest heaved with effort. Carmilla began to run her fingers between her work-worn hair, muttering meaningless calming words under her breath while Laura attempted to get the indignant rage under control.

"Are we putting on our crosses and going crusading?" Carmilla was compelled to ask, someone had to if Danny wasn't here to do it herself. "Danny is still banned from anything more sword-like than a bread knife, so you will need to bring your own white knight from home."

Laura tried to smile and failed valiantly. "I thought Danny was my own personal white knight?"

Carmilla sat up properly to make her displeasure known clearly. "We are sharing her. You know damn well I do a better damsel in distress than you."

"Half of everything you own is some kind of lace or satin or some other damsel-y materials, it's not a fair contest," Laura protested to the best of her ability as she leaned her forehead against Carmilla's. Perhaps she could leech some good feelings from her wife while resigning herself to being the new moody one in the relationship. "Can you ask around? See if it was a vampire or, I don't know, not human?"

Carmilla captured herself a good evening kiss from her wife, stopping herself narrowly from complaining that it took so long, and pretended to ponder the question as Laura regained her senses. "I think I should wait until Danny gets home to leave though," she said, wincing in preparation for the frustrated rant that was forthcoming always when they implied they were better at taking care of themselves. "Emotionally, I don't think I want either of you alone right now."

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

  
It was a hard choice, but Carmilla resolved to shun sleep until Danny got home the following night. Laura was curled up in bed with the report and her laptop. Working in bed was reserved for times of trouble and extreme lazy days. To retreat to bed and refuse company was an entirely different matter.

The vampire kept her distance, worrying while she respected the space Laura insisted she needed. Carmilla had an entire attic converted into a greenhouse to play with for as long as need be.

Danny had called at some ungodly hour of the morning when Carmilla was considering turning in for the night. Her wife was roughly as despondent as Laura, though there was less guilt undercutting the calm she tried to present. Danny grumbled at her superiors keeping her overnight when she could have been driving home to her partners. They were insisting on her staying for the rest of the morning so she could be debriefed for what exactly she was allowed to tell the pesky journalist she stubbornly kept on being married to, very inconvenient.

Carmilla demanded a second call when Danny successfully escaped from the base, so she could start counting down the hours it would take for backup to arrive and save her from the comforting duties she was failing spectacularly at providing. She didn't even manage to get what Laura was even working on out of her wife before their bedroom door was soundly closed.

She spent the entire night sitting upright with Laura's head in her lap, watching her slumbering wife for signs of distress. The dawn spilled over the horizon just in time of Laura to stir from her short sleep that didn't feel like it was long enough to Carmilla.

Laura was a whirlwind of activity when she woke, leaving Carmilla relegated to overly chatty scenery. Somehow she ended up on the other side of their bedroom door and belatedly noticed that Laura hadn't had anything to eat or drink since her scotch the night before.

Carmilla greeted Danny's second call like it was a lifeboat and she was on the damn Titanic. Grief was one thing, Laura's single-minded determination fuelled by loss and guilt working in tandem was a whole other big, scary animal that Carmilla wasn't tackling alone.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

The heavy boots stomping their way up the front steps was exactly what Laura needed.

Carmilla sat in her armchair and was as steady as a rock with her presence. Laura had reluctantly let her in for food delivery and then gave up working in favour of hiding in bed when exhaustion took over from determination.

Carmilla perked up first, enhanced hearing and not having two layers of blankets covering her ears working in tandem, and tossed her book aside carelessly as she roused Laura from her nest. When Laura went to complain, Carmilla simply held a finger to her lips and tilted her head towards the noise of keys rattling against their front door. Laura brightened instantaneously, throwing her arms around Carmilla's neck before nearly going head first into the carpet as her legs got tangled in her blankets.

The vampire still wasn't sure how she felt about the news and settled into silent support while she figured it out.

Laura ran down the stairs. The door was swinging open with a triumphant grunt and her wife appeared, tall and just as grief-stricken as Laura was.

Launching herself into Danny's arms, Laura burrowed into a warm chest that wheezed just like hers did. Carmilla followed at a sedate pace, wandering down the stairs and allowing them the time to grieve in peace. She sat on the third step from the ground and shared a grim smile of greeting with Danny over Laura's head.

Carmilla flinched as her eyes were drawn to the name patch on Danny's uniform. The stab of gut-wrenching loss was unexpected. She wrapped her arms around herself and let the concern for her wives' take over from her own indefinable problem.

"They head-hunt me for my experience, and then ignore my advice when I tell them this wasn't a normal thing," Danny said instead of the comforting platitudes Carmilla could muster on her own.

Dealing with the problem head-first broke through the walls of guilt Laura had thrown up immediately. Carmilla could have slapped herself for not mustering even some false enthusiasm for going after what could just be a standard murder. Danny looked just as dismayed as Laura so Carmilla resolved to continue on her somewhat silent support course of action.

"Was your day at work bad, dear?" Carmilla bit at the open statement, using the term of endearment like she always did, like she had a personal objection of cheesy family sitcoms. Which she absolutely did. "Have they decided what to do with you yet?"

Laura gave no indication that she had heard either of them speak, standing in Danny's arms like it would bring him back and make everything okay again.

"They have some background they, you know," Danny absently ran her fingers through Laura's hair while she considered her words, "acquired from the locals. Interviews from the other people in the building. They think he knew something or someone was coming for him. Apparently he spent his last few days scared out of his mind and avoiding all human contact. Work was not fun today."

"He's got family, right?" Laura asked into the frustrated silence Danny left behind her words. "Someone to organise the funeral and all that?"

Danny was silent for so long that Laura had to pull back to stare up at her wife with wide, curious eyes. Carmilla stayed perfectly still and let them deal with the fallout on their own.

"I would have to check my paperwork, they're not the closest of families," Danny danced around the major point her and Kirsch had bonded over during her last year at Silas. Absent families were plentiful among the foreign students of Silas University. The school's pitch appealed to those who wanted to be literally anywhere but home. Also the Dean's various manipulative tactics, but mostly the need to escape. "I think I have a few names in the file but I'm not sure if anyone will even be informed."

"Someone has to identify the body though, right?" Laura's no nonsense voice precluded any grief she clearly felt underneath the single-minded drive to know what happened. Danny shifted her weight then nearly jumped out of her skin when her phone started ringing. "If that's work, I might snap the damn thing in half if you even think about answering it."

Neither Danny nor Carmilla questioned the honesty to her threat, there was no way she wouldn't take a hammer to the device if she couldn't do it with her bare hands. Danny pulled it out of her pocket and tilted her head to the side as she answered.

Carmilla watched her wife handle the call with increasing discomfort. Laura picked up on it and resumed her close hold, trying to give Danny what ever support she had left.

"Of course, I can be there in the morning," Danny concluded after a short exchange with whoever was at the other end of the call. She hung up and stared at Laura curiously. "Have you developed some sort of psychic ability while I've been gone?"

Danny's attempts at introducing humour into serious situations rarely went well. "If you have to go back to the base after you just got home," Laura left her words with a vague threat, a tactic that worked wonders on both Danny and Carmilla. The vampire smirked and raised an eyebrow at Danny, daring her to try and leave the house to go back to work without some kind of scorch marks. Danny rose to neither baiting attempt, a far cry from when she was younger and crumpled at the first sign of displeasure in her partners.

"Yes, someone has to identify the body," Danny answered Laura's earlier question, slipping her phone back into her pocket with a sigh. Carmilla stood and made herself busy fighting with their simple coffee machine to provide three strong Irish coffees, it was starting to look like another long night. "It's nearly a four hour drive, isn't it?"

Laura laughed under her breath at the feigned reluctance, knowing exactly how far the drive would need to be to put Danny off doing her duty to a friend. "I'll come with you, I need to get at the locals anyway."

"We're taking the testosterone-mobile!" Carmilla shouted from the kitchen where she was glaring at the shiny chrome monstrosity her wives came home with when she let them go shopping by themselves. "And I call back seat!"

"Most people argue over who gets shotgun," noted Danny, ducking her head to kiss her wife. Laura's arms were around her neck and refusing to let go immediately. Danny had been gone a long time for the latest phase of her training, accelerated yet still time-consuming. "Why hello there."

Laura pulled her back in, demanding attention from her wayward wife. Carmilla spent longer than she should have poking around their alcohol shelf, finding the right bottle of whiskey just as Danny managed to pull herself free of Laura's demanding lips.

"Is it too late to talk you into being a fire-fighter or an unreasonably in-shape housewife?" Laura groaned, fingers tangling themselves in Danny's hair as she kept her close forcefully. Danny giggled. "Yeah, didn't think so."

"Hey Laura?" Carmilla called from the kitchen. She took the reluctant grunt Laura gave as acknowledgement. "When was the last time you ate?"

Laura cursed her evil wife and her sneaky little tricks. She closed her eyes and buried her face in Danny's neck as she was lifted by the waist and carried forcibly into the kitchen by the giant pain in her side. "Danny, I'm fine, I promise."

She was abruptly set down at their breakfast bar despite her protests and the previously firm grip she had on Danny's hair. Laura settled on glaring at them both, alternating between venom for Carmilla and exasperated fondness for Danny.

"Is your answer to the question 'breakfast time today'?" Danny asked over her shoulder, somewhat rhetorically. Laura crossed her arms and remained silent. "Taking that as a 'no'. What about you, when was the last time you slept?"

Carmilla froze while adding more Irish whisky than strictly necessary. Quickly taking mental stock of herself, Carmilla concluded that there was no external evidence that Danny could have picked up on. "I'm pretty sure I'm asleep night now, and you're a fantastic dream I'm having?"

Laura snorted. "So, sometime last week?"

Carmilla met Laura's venomous glare with one of her own. She opened her mouth to argue, but Danny got there first.

"You don't get to talk, Hollis," Danny snapped, placing a bowl of sugar-filled cereal in front of Laura. "I understand the urge," she said to Carmilla in a much softer tone. Laura held her hands up in annoyance. "And you're both being self-destructive idiots about this."

Laura grumbled as she ate her brightly coloured meal. Carmilla sipped at her coffee with a pleased smile.

"You, bed, now," Danny ordered Carmilla as her wife drained the scalding liquid in seconds. "Laura, finish that slowly. I will be in the shower and we are meeting in bed in half an hour to figure out the plan for tomorrow."

With that, Danny was gone, off up the stairs. Less than a minute later, the sound of running water met their ears as Carmilla and Laura shared amused looks.

"I worry for whatever idiots they give her to boss around," Carmilla broke the silence, pushing Laura's mug in front of her. "What do you think about drinking in bed?"

Laura shovelled the remainder of her meal into her mouth quickly, nearly choking on the coloured rings as she went. Swallowing hard, she pointed at Carmilla with her spoon. "I'm all for it, and Danny will be too if you take it up to her now."

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

Carmilla slept for sixteen hours straight, Danny counted.

At dawn Danny rolled out of bed to do her morning push-ups, counting them off in her head while keeping her ears trained on her sleeping partners. They both basically passed out when she got them into bed, worrying her to no end. She hadn't been gone all that long on the latest of her training courses and they were a two woman wreck by the time she got home. Biting back the annoyance, Danny reminded herself that the last few days were horribly abnormal and she herself wasn't exactly dealing with the emotional toll the loss was having.

For example, she pushed herself further and further until she physically couldn't hold her body up any more. Then she collapsed, breathing heaving yet muted so she didn't disturb either of them, rested for a solid minute, and forced herself back up to punish her body some more.

Then she did it three more times.

Having blood pounding through her ears was not the best choice while trying to keep track of Laura and Carmilla. They were both shockingly silent as the woke in the morning and only tended to make any noise if they were woken up before they were ready. After just over fifteen hours of sleep, Carmilla was still not quite ready to wake from her peaceful rest. Laura on the other hand, hadn't stayed awake well beyond what she was generally comfortable with, and managed to roll to the edge of the bed without Danny hearing her move at all.

"When do you want to leave?" Laura asked, causing Danny to lose all form in her push-ups, her elbows turning out uncomfortably. Danny lifted her head to see the source of the sound and let herself fall to the floor when she saw the critical eye being run over her entire body. "How many of those have you done?"

Danny rolled to her back with considerable effort and stretched her arms above her head to take stock of the damage her avoidance of the day she was about to face made. She winced, Laura right along with her, as her shoulders complained both over the punishment she'd given them and that the nice rhythmic motions she had going had stopped so suddenly. "About twenty too many," she moaned out, letting her head fall back against the unreasonably comfortable carpeting.

Laura grinned down at Danny, her eyes half-lidded with sleep. Danny cracked open one of her eyes to see Laura visibly remember why Danny was pushing herself beyond her limits. "He's gone, isn't he?"

The smallness of her own voice caused Laura to wince. Danny sat up and could picture clearly little Laura being sat down by her father. She held out her arms, inviting Laura to join her or to play it off as stretching, knowing that Laura could find it patronising or she could not depending on how her wife felt about herself on any given day.

Laura fell out of bed with minimal rusting and managed to land on top of Danny's body without so much as moving Carmilla's hair. Danny thanked Artemis for small favours. One wife at a time today, Danny thought with a comforting squeeze to the woman in her arms.

"And we know it isn't a random fact of life," Danny stated instead of answering Laura's question. "We think it isn't, at least."

Laura wiggled around to get comfortable perched on top of her wife. "How did your meeting go? Other than them not listening to your advice."

"They only called me back because the locals are undergoing a wagon-circling against absolutely everyone, even the military and government investigators."

Danny let her arms rest across Laura's midsection as they informed her driving to Kirsch's city would be a gruelling affair.

"We could leave now, just pick her up and see how long it takes for her to wake up," suggested Laura, competitiveness shining through.

"Last time we played that, she went to the Dean's old house to sleep for like a week," Danny had to argue. She had spent more than enough of her year away from her wives and she wasn't about to piss one of them off without a damn good reason. "We'll get the stuff ready, and we can leave as soon as she wakes up."

Laura lifted her head to pout up at Danny for her terrible sensibleness, "you know you still have to carry her if we want to leave before tonight, right?"

Danny's arms itched to grab her other love, missing her with an ache that surpassed the physical fatigue. "I think I'll manage."


	3. Chapter 3

Vampires are not hurt by sunlight.

"Why does the military provide cars without freaking tinted windows?" Carmilla was not a normal vampire in all kinds of ways. "Xena, please turn off the sun?"

"The dignified Countess Karnstein, ladies and other ladies," Laura mocked gently from the front seat, entirely too up-and-go for Carmilla's liking.

"Isn't it Countess Hollis now?" Danny was technically driving, but only had two fingers on the wheel and Laura didn't want to count that because they were all going to die in a fireball. "The most ancient and noble house conquered peaceably by some journalist lady?"

"You might have been more white knight than usual but I remember there being a war over my naming rights," Carmilla's words caused Danny to snap her whole left hand onto the wheel and Laura to gain an intense interest in the passing clouds. "Laura won by being still standing at the end of it, mostly, so hush and drive."

"Do we have a plan, or is it just say I'm a rep from Special Forces and we bully our way in?" With Danny's question, Carmilla let her head fall into the pillow that was shoved into her arms after being gently placed in the back by her annoying, talking wife. "Goodnight darling."

"Go to Hell, sweetie," she replied, piling on the sugar in her voice. "You too, Cupcake."

Danny's smile was luminous. Laura bit her bottom lip to keep from laughing.

"Cranky vampire this morning," Laura said while leaning over the centre console, as if she were remarking upon the weather and not her irritable wife. "Early short odds are on 'attacks a cop' and 'needs fresh blood before dinnertime'." At this, Danny lost all joy on her face.

"I am not holding back police for her, I don't care how married we are," she grumbled, pointedly not meeting Laura's accusatory eyes. "I will protest for a little while if I am made to hold back law enforcement?"

"See? Honesty is good for you," Laura cheered. Danny felt the regret creeping in, she should not have made Laura a monster coffee before they left. "Also, donating blood to your wife is not great in the short term, but she does do that thing with your neck that you really, really, really-"

"Laura!"

Carmilla whined from behind them, and was soundly ignored. Laura did not look one bit chastised.

"So you don't like the neck thing?" Laura demanded, turning to slam her hand on the hand break. "Carm, she doesn't like the neck thing, stop doing it immediately."

Carmilla whacked Laura in the head with her pillow and stuffed her face into it as if that would drown out the terrible sounds they were making. "I will do whatever I please with Danny's neck. We both married her and we agreed to share," she mumbled into the fabric of her neon green pillow.

"Does Danny get a say in this?" A second thump from the pillow hit Danny's arm that she totally was using to drive.

"No! My neck," snarled Carmilla then promptly fell right back into her important dozing schedule.

Danny's right arm gave up all pretence of being involved with the process of driving, coming to rest behind Laura and distracting her long enough to drop the argument. "They aren't going to move out of the way if I pull rank, or whatever. They already refused to tell us anything more than they told you, which is basically nothing."

Laura sighed as Danny's long fingers started to run through her hair. "How do we feel about breaking and entering?"

Danny tugged on her hair accidentally. The overwhelming thoughts running through her mind all screamed that getting caught would cost her job and all the time away from her idiots would be for nothing. Danny mulled the crime plan until Carmilla was totally and completely asleep.

"If you try to visit a friend with a criminal determination while I'm at the coroner's office and that one's going for a record-breaking nap at the hotel, then who am I to stop my independent wives whom I cannot possibly be called to testify against in court," Danny said while she studiously kept her eyes on the road ahead of them.

Laura's head snapped to her wife, curiosity dancing around in her eyes. "I was unaware that having multiple legal spouses was legal, Major Hollis. Is there something you know about the legal system I don't?"

Danny blushed almost on command and she had never paid more attention to one-handed driving in her life. "It's a weird Special Forces perk that I am not thinking about in the same way that I didn't think too hard about Silas as a whole."

"What the fuck?"

"Marital rights exist between you and me as far as the military and also the government are concerned," she explained as shortly as possible. "Carmilla Karnstein is technically dead, so she doesn't count as a people under the law."

"Are we sure you haven't accidentally joined the Initiative?" Laura felt the need to clarify the point each and every time Danny's work came up. "If they try to give you super-soldier stuff, then you are running the heck away so we can burn them to the ground."

Danny sighed, "no, for the seventy-fifth time, I did not join the damn Initiative. We aren't putting technologically improbably chips in vampire heads. If we did have that kind of tech, we would obviously be using it to find anyone who isn't human when random villagers start going missing only to be found later with mysterious neck wounds."

  
  


 

* * *

 

 

 

 

  
They rolled into town around noon.

Carmilla slipped between waking and asleep, drifting whenever she woke to them discussing their game plan. She was here to be supportive and that did not extend to the seventeen laws they were planning on breaking in even the tamest of their plans.

To be sure, she checked repeatedly that she'd remembered her wallet in case bail money was required.

"Are you awake enough to walk on your own or does Danny need to carry you?" Carmilla glared sleepily at Laura, taking great offence to the suggestion that she might not be capable of walking on her own. She couldn't remember how she got into the car in the first place, but there was no doubt in her mind that she did it under her own power.

"Let's not do that and maybe not draw attention to ourselves," Danny argued. Carmilla took that as a win and bolted from the car the second Danny managed something that could be considered competent parking, mostly to the legally blind. Laura was so excited and Carmilla so offended that neither of them stopped to tease her, a firm win for Danny.

Danny didn't bother coming up to their room with her partners, instead walking over to the familiar building she knew Kirsch had lived in, had died in. The walk cleared her head of the frothing rage she had riled herself into. She tried to downplay how much information the Special Forces had accumulated on the case and especially how they refused to share more than a sliver of it with Danny and even the locals. Understanding the regulations in play and accepting them were two entirely different beasts.

Major Danny Lawrence wasn't allowed in on in-depth analysis for cases that her non-existent unit wasn't assigned to, and that drove her to the brink of madness. The literal ton of paperwork was stacked neatly in the brand new base just a few hours away from home, and Danny had spent the last week of her training coming to terms with the possible people she could have them recruit to her team. She was given authorisation for one Lieutenant to be picked from inside Special Forces or brought in to be trained like she was, and four Privates to cover whatever support she would need in the field.

But there wouldn't be any official investigations into suspicious cases like this until Danny picked her five and got them approved and trained, a process that would take a year. Maybe in a year her superiors would let her take a look back at the information they had on Kirsch.

That didn't help her now that Laura was chomping at the story like she was starving. A friend had died and Laura wouldn't stop until she knew exactly what happened and whomever was responsible was brought to justice.

At least Danny now had the military authority to arrest people directly causing harm to others. She wouldn't have to chase after people like Casey Kirkland without a plan beyond 'kill them'.

Laura was coordinating her paper from their hotel room, where she had promised to stay until Danny tried to get into either the local police files or the apartment building itself. She had a creeping bad feeling that the little information Special Forces had given her was totally accurate and Wilson Kirsch knew he was going to be killed.

The apartment building wasn't in a bad part of town, nor was it in an especially affluent area. It was perfectly average and Danny thought that's what attracted Kirsch to the place. That and there was a 'really kicking' bar within walking distance that even Danny had to admit did excellent onion rings. They had just started putting his own beer on tap.

Danny forced the urge to cry away and hunched down as locals at a cafe stared at her with interest. Recon on the apartment building, chat with anyone official looking at the scene, then go identify one of your closest friend's body. Today was going to suck.

  
  


 

* * *

 

 

 

 

  
Danny tried, she really did.

Kirsch had given her his family's details when they signed forms for her to be his next of kin, so she had given them every chance to come and say goodbye to their son.

During the attack on Silas by the werewolf pack, they had a scared discussion about what they wanted done when they were inevitably killed by the weird of the school. Depressingly, they both wanted the same thing. Something simple with their comrades in arms in attendance and a decent eulogy given by whichever one of them survived. That was easy enough to organise.

In return for her solid hour attempting to contact them, his family returned with a curt response. It amounted to they couldn't afford plane tickets and shipping his body home wasn't worth the expenditure. Could she please have someone record the service and send it to them?

Danny was a snarling, spitting rage monster as she approached their hotel. The family had promised to pay her back eventually for the flowers they asked her to buy on their behalf.

The calming walk to his apartment stopped being calming as soon as she saw how tightly the locals had the scene locked up. Exactly none of them were responding to the few remaining reporters so Danny decided her time was better spent at the precinct next to the coroner's office.

Identifying a body wasn't the most pleasant of experiences. Her guts churned as the scent of death escaped the morgue itself. Danny had seen bodies before so it quickly settled. She forced herself into the military calm six months of basic training had drilled into her, thankful that she had waved off both Carmilla and Laura when they offered to come with her. Carmilla would be distracted by the faint scent of blood in the air while Laura, well Danny didn't know how Laura would react to a body, but she didn't need to just yet and Danny wasn't going to let her do it while there was something Danny could do.

He didn't look peaceful. No amount of make-up or sheets covering him would make the violence of his death look peaceful. It was definitely Kirsch, and she was definitely about to plan a damn funeral.

The walk back to the hotel only made it worse. The anger was there and it was burning and righteous.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

Laura called every single person she knew in town, either by reputation or shared interest in a particularly weird or interesting case. Half of them hung up as soon as she asked them about the case, the other half had even less interest in the strange side of Kirsch's murder than the local police seemed to have.

She needed to find new contacts for the case, someone had to have shut Greg out. It certainly wasn't the police themselves that told him to get fucked.

Scoping out the local police precinct took up most of her day, scrawling hasty notes in her very professional pocket notebook. The local coffee culture was not up to Silas University standards, but she knew Silas had some kind of supernatural influence over every on-campus business like the Clockwork.

Though Laura didn't notice she was doing it, she had a brain full of knowledge about the local take-out places ready for room service to suck at their hotel.

Through her study of the precinct she caught sight of the weirder side of her industry and matched it to Greg's succinct descriptions of the people who clearly had information they wanted who blocked his questions and investigations at every turn.

As the evening rush for caffeine began, Laura stretched her neck and went to work.

Three hours, five coffees, nine new contacts, and one weary walk later, Laura was greeted by Danny doing breathing exercises while sitting on the front steps of their hotel.

"Want Thai food for dinner?" Laura asked instead of greeting her wife. Danny's vicious glare wasn't aimed at Laura, but it was still on her face, twisting it into a cruel expression. "Want beer for dinner?"

Danny's glare softened in intensity as she relaxed some of the tension coiling in her body. She sighed, dragging both of her hands through her hair and standing to face Laura's supportive little face. "I want a bottle of whisky for dinner, so I should probably go for the Thai."

Laura opened her arms for a hug, giving Danny every opportunity to back away. Danny melted into her arms and Laura reminded herself to warn Carmilla away from being a pain tonight.

"Thai then beer?"

Danny kissed the top of her head and kept an arm slung over Laura's shoulders as they wandered their way back to their vampire.

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

The beer was good, even Carmilla admitted it, and the take-out sent Danny into a mild calorie-shock. Laura didn't think about how Carmilla had got her hands on the key to the roof of their hotel, but she was glad her wife did.

Carmilla just wanted them both close, the open air and the view of only the brightest of celestial bodies was a happy coincidence. Danny was curled into herself, draining the bottles of beer at the rate Laura and Carmilla managed put together. They let the indulgence slide, they didn't actually like the taste of beer so that had to be making the difference more pronounced.

Laura fussed with the plethora of contact information she teased and bribed out of the local police and invoked solidarity with the same local newspaper owners to much more success than Greg had, something about actually being the boss broke through their local embargoes. She set her sights on the crime scene photographers and the evidence lock-up at police HQ in the middle of town. Tomorrow she would make them beg for mercy, for a time machine so they could go back to dealing with Greg.

Danny resolved to spend the rest of their time in town to go through the few digitised copies of her recruitment pool. She needed a team and she needed one now. Missing the Summer Society wasn't something new, but it hurt down to her bones now she couldn't call on them any more. Dealing with the funeral details for the following day was a point on her to-do list that she was drinking heartily to forget until the morning.

While Danny slouched in the plastic deck chair she had found lying around on the rooftop and Laura leaned back in between Danny's legs, typing out emails on her tablet to her 'idiot employees' who clearly couldn't be trusted to spend more than three days on their own without her micromanaging all of them. While they were occupied, Carmilla stretched out on the picnic blanket that was always on hand in both of their cars, staring at the stars and occasionally pointing out one when a particular story took her fancy.

It got to nearly midnight and Danny only responding in annoyed grunts and affirmative groans for Carmilla's interest to be taken by a particular constellation. She traced the three brightest stars in the air with a raised finger, getting Laura's attention away from her tablet and Danny's lethargic interest. Carmilla weighed the words in her head, trying to divine if they would restart the misery in them.

"Pyxis, the mariner's compass," she started in her all-knowing voice. Danny sat up and started playing with Laura's hair without consciously thinking about it. Laura put the tablet the whole way down. "Originally part of a larger constellation that's now broken up into pieces."

Laura twisted to meet Danny's amused look. They silently argued until Carmilla cleared her throat. Laura jumped the most at the sudden noise and therefore lost the argument. "Bigger constellation, Carm?"

"Seriously?" Carmilla sat up to glare at the two of them. "I have told that one before, I think."

"Battle of Trafalgar memorial for dead French ships?" Danny tried first, stopping from continuing when she caught the displeasure coming from Carmilla.

"Something Greek probably," Laura cast a much wider net, then the mariner part of the constellation hit her and she took a stab in the dark, "Jason?"

"The Argo actually," Carmilla corrected, stretching out again while Danny resumed the braid she'd only just noticed she was halfway done doing in Laura's hair. "All very nautical."

Danny gave her credit for trying, even if it was in the most roundabout way possible shy of quoting The Little Mermaid at them. "Plenty of death there too, if I'm remembering right."

"I-" Carmilla stopped to wrap her arms around herself. "I'm not very good at this," she finally settled on admitting. Laura and Danny didn't move, experience telling them that physical comfort would be a hindrance when Carmilla was like this. "I haven't had to deal with it for a long time."

"The police and the coroner said they need to keep the," Danny paused to close her eyes, take a deep breath then a mouthful of her last beer, "they need to gather some final evidence and will sign the release papers in the morning. I'm okay if you need to leave, no questions asked."

"Was it your parents?" Laura asked, curiosity taking over from tact. It was rare that Carmilla mentioned her life before Ell and the coffin besides the ball and the Dean's first appearance in her life. "The last time you-"

"Yes," Carmilla cut her off. Laura felt Danny's body shift closer to Carmilla and wondered if she knew she was even moving. "They lived long, happy, childless lives and their funerals were dignified and well-attended. I think there was a memorial service for me, but without a body, why bother really?"

"Naturally," Danny agreed, finishing the rest of her beer and trying to stand without kicking Laura in the face. "I have a meeting with a funeral director in the morning, so I am going to have to cut stargazing story time short."

Carmilla was on her feet and steadying Danny as she successfully swung her legs free of Laura in an instant, helping Laura up with her next moment.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

  
Organising a funeral for one of her closest friends didn't draw the emotional toll Danny was expecting. The industry took over as soon as the police were done searching for evidence and they had everything recorded. Everyone she had to speak to was respectfully professional and only got more helpful once they found out she was a soldier. Carmilla snorted blood out of her nose when Danny informed her partners that she got a massive 'service' discount before she explained what she meant.

Laura took a break from her two day long canvas of the entire town for literally anyone in her industry to talk to, even with more background information on the victim than anyone else on the continent. The break consisted of asking Danny over and over if she was sure she could handle the funeral arranging bits on her own and promptly getting skittish if Danny even implied that yes, she would like some help please.

Carmilla generally wanted nothing to do with the already dead. A frat boy she barely tolerated because of his ally status with Laura and friendship with Danny struggled to be more than an inconvenience to the vampire. She was here on supporting Danny and Laura grounds, not preparing a damn funeral intentions.

Danny's visit to the funeral home was done alone. She considered not even telling her partners that she was going, anything to stop the concerned to worried range of expressions they couldn't seem to keep off their faces. Her protective instincts flared as his family continued to suck at giving a shit about their kid, but Danny knew what that was like and knew how much Kirsch would enjoy them not coming to his funeral.

So she arranged it for the very next day. Fuck 'em.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

  
The battlefield still stank to high Hell and back. Carmilla wanted to rip out her olfactory senses, the dead were as offensive as their blood was delightful.

Danny was gone now, she was going to leave before and now she's really, really gone.

The man wandered through the gore of bodies ripped apart by both bullets and the raw strength of the supernatural dead. Carmilla knew he was there and could hear him muttering to himself.

The sound of a battle long fallen silent screamed into her ears as the elevator came to a stop.

The violence was gone, the man disappeared, and Carmilla was left standing in an empty elevator car with no idea why she felt so alone.

The last funeral she attended technically was one of her own, though she wasn't exactly going to tell Laura and Danny that Mother held a funeral for her time in the coffin. That was the last time she felt so isolated. There was a reason where there wasn't now. Bile tried to crawl up her throat, the scent of death lodging itself in her nose and refusing to leave.

Before she could get her bearings the elevator came to a stop with a ding. The shining doors slid open to reveal her wife in her despondent glory. Laura had raised the point that Danny's black dress wasn't long enough to be funeral appropriate, only to be shot down by Carmilla being very, very clear that she herself would be wearing leather pants regardless so Danny wasn't going to be the most inappropriate.

The half-cut black jacket and her tired eyes reading glasses made her wife look elegantly put together for a woman who spent the entire previous night clinging to her partners in a state of loss and being really aware of her own mortality.

"You look," she had to trail off, leaning against the back of the elevator and folding her arms. Danny raised her eyebrows, amused by something clearly. "What?"

Danny reached into the car and grabbed her by the arm, pulling Carmilla out of the metal box in one fluid motion. "Most people get off the elevator when they get where they are going."

The doors slid shut behind her and Carmilla leaned back to hit the up button. "I know that, I was looking for you, I found you."

"Oh, I was considering taking the stairs to avoid Laura a little longer if you want to join me?" It was Danny's turn to fold her arms uncomfortably. "I'm scared of what Laura at a funeral looks like, mostly that it's going to be 'like she's at a work function'."

Carmilla trailed a hand down Danny's arms until she allowed their fingers to lace together, using the connection to pull Danny out of the hotel lobby. Off towards the supernatural-friendly cafe/bar Carmilla sniffed out mere hours after arriving in town they went.

Buying Danny coffee was a hit and miss challenge that was impossible to master no matter how long one spent trying to game the system. Laura and Carmilla agreed that there was no system and Danny's tongue was broken. They immediately decided to never speak of their discussion again, lest irony strike down Danny's tongue for real.

"Laura is going to be perfectly well-behaved with restraint and an ironclad promise to me that she will only slip into work-mode if the something extremely suspicious happens," Carmilla tried to reassure her wife once they were seated. Danny started to argue, but Carmilla knew exactly what she was going to say. "My definition of extremely suspicious, not hers."

"I love you," Danny stated, the exhaustion of the last week shining through. Carmilla wondered how long she had spent in front of the mirror covering the dark circles under her eyes. Danny wasn't the type to deprive herself of sleep, so it worried Carmilla now she looked like she wasn't sleeping properly. "Are they making you a blood smoothie?"

"Jealous?"

Danny stopped herself from messing up her hair, grabbing one hand with the other. "Only if you like it better than mine."

"Laura's going to worry about us if we're missing much longer," Carmilla felt the need to point out as she stared at her drink with a hungry interest. "I was sent out as a search party because you aren't answering your phone."

Danny flushed as she fumbled around in her downright dainty purse for her scary advanced military-issue phone that Carmilla was wary of touching. "I have several missed calls from 'Obey The Hypno-', word I'm not saying in public, Carmilla."

The glare the vampire got was lacklustre despite her deserving it full force for once. Carmilla was seen to be wary of Danny's phone, loudly and clearly for alibi reasons. "It was Laura?"

Danny tapped out a text to Laura with a screenshot of her contacts list included. "Your defence shouldn't involve a question mark, you pervy old woman."

Carmilla's smoothie arrived at the same time as Danny's sugar explosion frappe so the vampire dove for it to potentially save her life. "Are you denying the veracity of my claim?"

Draining the liquid sugar featuring coffee in long mouthfuls that had Carmilla stunned, Danny pushed the blended blood towards her suddenly quiet wife. "If it never, ever gets back to her, then I agree wholeheartedly. Otherwise, she ain't the boss of us."

"What did you send her?" Carmilla sipped at her blood at a more sedate pace. Danny turned a brighter shade of red as she tucked her phone away. "Was it 'yes dear one I'm going to be dishonourably discharged over if not straight up tried for treason' or something less extreme this time?"

Danny grinned into the remaining bits of ice-cream in the bottom of her cup. Carmilla felt the pride swelling in her chest and resisted the urge to curl herself into Danny's side to claim a reward for a mission well done. "Nope, threw you under the bus to save myself. You can take one of those to the face, right?"

"Told her I turned your phone on silent through my fantastic seduction techniques coupled with my spectacularly poor timing?" Carmilla whined, changing seats so she was sitting next to her wife. Danny needed all the cuddles she could get when she remembered why Laura was so worried. Carmilla wanted to be as close as possible when the funeral came rushing back at her. "We should get back before you unhinge your jaw to eat the cup too."

Danny grimaced. "Hell no, that was disgusting. Was yours drinkable?" She tossed the nearly cleaned cup into the provided bins and practically ripped Carmilla's arm from her shoulder pulling her out of the cafe/bar. "Don't lie, they put cinnamon in it and you hate that."

Carmilla coughed on the sip she was forcing down. "Is that what that is?"

"How have you got this far in your life without learning the names of things you don't like?"

The fresh air was a nice reprieve from the demonic cinnamon. "It is only recently that I've started eating not-blood again," Carmilla answered, dancing forward ahead of Danny with a free spirit despite the heavy toll of the day ahead. "Is it wrong to say you look fucking amazing today?"

Danny spent the entire two minute walk back to their hotel and their wife thinking about the question as she continued to blush under the compliment, so rare outside of specifically romantic situations. Laura was bouncing her legs as she sat at the bus stop outside of the hotel. The parking garage entrance was close-by and Laura nervously fiddled with Danny's car keys as she was seemingly unable to sit still.

"I won't tell the dude running the thing if you don't," Danny finally answered, grabbing Carmilla's hand to use some of her strength. "We could ask the mature one for her opinion?"

Laura stood as she caught sight of her lazily wandering partners. "Danny, it's a funeral, not a runway. You do not need to look that good, it's frankly social entrapment when we get caught leering mid-service."

"She appears to be on my side," deduced Carmilla, brilliantly. Danny gasped in offence. "What?"

Danny sighed heavily. "Could we get over being an inappropriate mess of people before we get there please?"

Laura straightened her own dress, suddenly self-conscious in the face of Major Cocktail Dress and Madame Leather Pants. If there was one thing Laura Hollis was used to, it was clothing-based inadequacy issues. She treated the problem like she did most of her wife-based issues. "You're driving," she tossed the keys to Danny, "and you're in charge of shoulders to cry on, clear?"

They both nodded dumbly and immediately started carrying out her assigned jobs. Laura got to trail behind them both, with a fantastic view. They got to think they were in charge of themselves. Everyone won when Laura just had to step in and direct them all.

A funeral was a bigger ask than usual though.


	4. Chapter 4

Laura's short stature was only an advantage once or twice each year. This was one of them, she slunk into the back rooms of the police station without anyone noticing her. If they did notice her, then they, like many people, assumed she was a teenager out on a field trip and she was swiftly ignored. Getting into the evidence lock-up was worryingly easy for her, and all the ease of her trip did was convince her that the locals were not fit to handle the case.

Idly while she waited for someone to go into the cage door, Laura started devising ways to talk Danny into demanding authority in Kirsch's murder. Job one would obviously be getting it classed as a pre-meditated murder, and the whispers she'd heard in her canvassing of the people in his daily life led her to believe that Kirsch knew something or someone was coming for him.

It was a new recruit that opened the door for her, and he didn't stick around to listen for the door closing properly while he was inside the cage. Laura rushed to slip in between the door and the frame, barely making a noise and making sure to close it behind her with little delay. The recruit logged something in and was back out of the cage without catching sight of Laura. These people definitely couldn't be trusted to do a decent job.

The plastic boxes full of evidence were ordered by crime and then by victim surname, it was simple to find KIRSCH, W. Laura pulled it onto the floor and used her gloves and tweezers to sift through the evidence, taking pictures as she went. She carefully went through the entire box, not taking in any information as she went.

The whole process took less than an hour and Laura was never coming to this city again, the sudden lack of confidence in local law enforcement scared her greatly.

Danny was massaging her temples while Carmilla played with her combat multi-tool while bouncing on their temporary bed. Laura took one look at Danny's tight grip on her phone and the blood moustache Carmilla had, and left the room in search of coffee.

When she got back to their room, Carmilla was in the bathroom with the shower running while Danny paced around almost yelling into her phone. From what Laura could tell, Danny was ordering someone to organise her personnel files and setting the minimum requirements she had for her future team. Laura crept into the room, waving when Danny eventually caught sight of her. Laura set herself up on the bed with her phone, her laptop, and her tablet sitting in a semi-circle in front of her. She set in on categorising all of her images into different types of evidence and levels of relevance she could discern at a glance.

By far the biggest drain on her time in the evidence lock-up was the stack of letters tucked neatly inside envelopes. Taking each one out, photographing it, and then successfully getting it back into the packaging took well over half of her time. A cursory examination of the letters told her that they were more than worth the expenditure.

Each envelope was labelled with 'Wilson Kirsch' in neat handwriting, all capital letters. Laura wondered if she could write out two words exactly the same twenty-seven times over, as the author of the letters had done.

Carmilla wandered out of the bathroom with not a lot of clothing on. She had managed to put underwear on and given up there. The vampire dried her hair and pouted at Laura when Danny didn't immediately hang up her call. Laura felt that Danny hadn't actually seen Carmilla yet so the pouting was a bit premature.

"Thank you, Douglas, my wife is demanding my attention. Have it done within a week, clear?"

"Is there a mirror I can't see?" Carmilla traded confused looks with Laura, both of them turning to examine the wall in front of Danny. The woman in question tossed her phone onto their pile of clothes that burst out of their bags immediately after they arrived in the room.

"So you aren't standing there in next to nothing?" Danny asked without turning around. Laura watched as Carmilla balled up her wet towel and threw it at the back of Danny's head, hitting it with exact accuracy. "To be fair, I was talking about Laura," Danny fought back, turning and slinging the towel around Carmilla's neck, pulling her in for a kiss.

"Can we be distracted later?" Laura groaned, throwing herself back onto the bed in frustration. If they got started now neither of them would be in any state to help, not to mention Laura herself being drawn into the ensuing pile of bodies. "Keep it in your pants, or lack of pants, until after dinner then you can be as cuddly as you want, please?"

"Yes, Laura, cuddles is what I'm going for here," Carmilla drawled, working her way out of Danny's assisted hold. Laura glared half-heartedly at her.

"Put some clothes on before you catch your death," ordered Laura, pointing to the pile of clothes. Danny opened her mouth to ask about the odd turn of phrase and shut it with a click when it became obvious that her life would be better if she didn't know. "Danny, take the crime scene photos and the ones that Greg took of the crowd. Carm, put clothing on and tell me if you've ever seen wounds like these before."

Carmilla joined Laura on the bed and stretched herself out, turning Laura's laptop to examine the pictures of Kirsch's body. Danny remained dazed by Carmilla and Laura had to throw a pillow at her to prompt her into action. "What am I looking for?"

Laura lit up as one of her wives engaged fully, Carmilla would follow along with enthusiasm if both of her seduction targets were occupied. Danny stretched out far more impressively on Laura's other side and took her tablet to flick through the images. Laura knew exactly what she wanted, "anything in the apartment that strikes you as non-Kirsch behaviour and anyone out of place in the crowd outside the building."

"There's nothing not-human about any of these," Carmilla stated when she got to the end of the folder, "and they don't paint an especially suspicious picture as a whole. I'd say a normal person could do this, though they'd probably need to be up in the nosebleed height range. Like, Xena and taller, with muscles to match."

"That's around five-eight, five-nine?" Laura snatched her laptop back to check on how tall Lucy Lawless was, causing Carmilla to sigh. Danny giggled.

"She means me, Hollis," Danny corrected while poking Laura's side. Laura slowly placed the laptop back on the bed.

"Yeah I mean her: Major Hollis."

Danny sat up and threw Carmilla's towel back at her. "Weren't you getting dressed?"

Carmilla made a show of collecting something that could be considered clothing and pulled them on slowly. The feeling of being watched had never been more comfortable or encouraging. She spent longer than strictly necessary towel drying her hair.

"Danny, make her stop," whined Laura from the bed. Carmilla could see the enraptured expression on her face, matched nicely with the blind want Danny went for when worked up. Danny made a strangled noise between a laugh and a moan.

"It's your turn to be strong," argued Danny. "I did it last night at the restaurant."

Carmilla turned, scandalised and chest puffed up to maximum indignity. "That was all Cupcake, I was an innocent bystander. I have been framed."

"Danny, people your height or taller with some decent muscles," Laura smoothly changed the subject back to the work at hand. Neither of her wives called her on the move, despite the light blushed that graced her cheeks. "Carmilla, excellent being dressed by the way, can you go get cookies and something blended, green, and icky."

Carmilla shrugged, grabbing Laura's purse and venturing out of their room. Danny tried to scan the pictures, highlighting possible people of interest as she went, but got distracted again.

"It isn't that bad, you know," she threw out into the comfortable silence. Laura shifted so she was leaning against Danny's side. "You like berry smoothies, it's not that different."

Laura stretched up to kiss Danny's cheek, nuzzling it after and putting aside the letters in favour of seeking comfort from her wife. She hadn't considered the possibility that this was just one person killing another, but thus far there wasn't anything pointing to a supernatural answer. "I know, there's just no sugar in it and that's criminal."

"There's six dudes, two of which are cops and this one is the only one who isn't looking all curious and worried," Danny veered them back onto the task at hand. "The blond guy, looks a bit like a beardless lumberjack."

"Don't say it like that, you look like a beardless lumberjack sometimes," Laura said, distracted by the slightly out of focus man in the crowd. He didn't look like any kind of creature she knew of, though werewolves and vampires and the like didn't exactly stick out unless you were looking for them. "He's handsome, I guess, but just because he isn't like everyone else doesn't mean he's a murderer."

Danny frowned as she searched for the words to describe her gut instinct, "he feels off. People going against the grain generally have a good reason for it. You don't go gawk at a murder scene unless you're scared, curious, or gloating."

Laura bit her lower lip as Danny's work ringtone blasted into her thoughts. "Your other other spouse is calling," she teased, smiling proudly as Danny's work-face appeared. "Hang up immediately if they aren't fully dressed."

Danny glared playfully as she slipped off the bed and answered the call with a long-suffering sigh. "Major Hollis speaking."

Laura tuned out Danny vs Special Forces bureaucracy, round three, in favour of reading through the letters.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

  
Laura was happy the funeral was already done and dusted.

The letters were a horror show, each one more descriptive than the last. She didn't think she could contain the rage flowing through her veins as she read through detail after detail about Kirsch's life. Each point, from where he got his morning iced coffee to the exact time he was most likely to leave his favourite bar, was accompanied by a new way the sender was going to kill him.

The handwriting was perfectly neat and following invisible lines while remaining perfectly straight. The paper was so plain that she could find thousands of sheets just like it in any office on the planet. The envelopes were pristine besides the ripping Kirsch obviously did to get at the letters inside. There was no postage or address on them, so Laura presumed they were hand delivered or sent by courier.

They were only staying in town for one more night, if Laura wanted to question the police or any other journalists that she thought had more information then she would have to get it done that afternoon. Besides, this was technically Danny's precious time off and Laura herself couldn't handle another day of leaving her paper alone to run itself.

Laura tried reading the letters as if she were in Kirsch's shoes. She could feel the first few seeming like a prank, and picked out exactly when he would catch on that these were death threats. What Laura couldn't understand was why Kirsch hadn't called anyone for help. He was one of around ten people who knew what Danny was planning to do with her life and he called her when he broke his arm several months ago. If not the police, Kirsch would have called Danny or Laura if he felt his life was in danger.

The letter she presumed to be the final one Kirsch received perfectly described the crime scene photography Laura borrowed from the evidence box. Though it pained her to look at them, Laura tried to be objective as she examined the pictures of the body. Even the wounds were consistent with what the letter predicted.

Laura put down the folder of case notes and evidence so she could rub her eyes free of the images. The lack of wives in their hotel room was a bitter loss to her as she tried to cleanse herself of a dead friend. Carmilla was out fetching herself something fresh to eat while Danny asked for a night out alone for herself. Laura prepared herself for two drunk wives when they got home, anything to get her mind away from the case for a few moments.

The cop logging almost all of the evidence was the same, a Detective Eddie Corben. His basic profile was available online in part of a community outreach program by the local civil servant manager. Laura thought he looked like a moderately handsome middle-aged cop, perfectly average, never going to want to be promoted. Happy with his life with early crows feet around his eyes.

Laura made a note of what he looked like, did a quick search for establishments near the precinct that were known for being patronised frequently by the police, and left messages for both Danny and Carmilla letting them know she wouldn't be back for a while.

How hard could cornering a cop be?

  
  


 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

Shortly after they graduated, with Danny taking on her temporary position with the Silas Faculty and Kirsch doing an advanced degree that Danny didn't really understand, Kirsch called her from his first solo apartment off campus to deal with some shit that was freaking him out.

Danny went, after years of helping him not be an asshole any more they'd developed a halfway decent friendship, curiosity driving her more than any altruism or friendship motivations. He sounded terrified on the phone and her girlfriends' were both dead to the world. Exams had finished so Laura bunkered down underneath her blankets and Carmilla wrapped herself around Laura. Kirsch sounded genuinely distressed.

Wandering through the heavily damaged halls of the apartment complex, Danny knew for a fact that there was not a single person over thirty living in the entire area.

There was a hole in Kirsch's door. Danny frowned at it, her brain supplying the clear and obvious culprit. She sighed and knocked, she needed to know why the heck someone had shot an arrow through his door.

Sitting at the bar in the one establishment in the entire world that had Kirsch's beer on tap, Danny vaguely remembered the threat attached to the arrow in his door. Kirsch had spent weeks afterwards on edge with fear, it was an anonymous threat though Danny couldn't remember the details.

Guilt washed over her. The thought struck her tipsy mind that maybe the guy who killed Kirsch and sent letters telling him he was going to do it was also responsible for the arrow through his door and the threat as well.

Weakness wasn't a feeling Danny Hollis was used to, Danny Lawrence was a mess who got her ass kicked every other week, but now she was older and more experienced. It had taken ages to develop but she had finally found the ability to choose her battles, generally ones that didn't involve vampires without backup. She got her Summer girls to the point where a small team of them could conceivably overpower a vampire without the help of heavy artillery. Special Forces training made games of Hunter and Prey between her and Carmilla more competitive than ever.

The beer didn't have a high alcohol content so Danny presumed it was quantity over quality working on the hazy buzz going on in her head. This was not the time to be planning the basic building blocks of the unit she would have to construct sooner rather than later.

A LaFontaine type was needed. Danny hated the idea of using the Dimwit Squad template for her small unit, but it was an effective team for playing at the Scooby Gang, either version. She grabbed a coaster and flipped it to the blank side, pulling her short carpentry pencil from her pocket to make rough notes. A creature-feature expert or maybe another mad scientist.

Danny wrote the type down, four more to go.

The authorisation extended to picking one Lieutenant and Danny resolved to find the administrative version of Perry. Danny knew she would strive to take care of the team she put together but taking care of herself was one of her biggest problems. Laura and Carmilla would be supportive of any Lieutenant she picked if they could drag Danny by her ear away from danger if they had to.

An expert in explosives. That would stop her from this draining feeling of weakness sliding through her usually boundless courage. Having that kind of fire power on her team would go a long way into keeping the kids she would be given alive. All of the older, more experienced soldiers were no doubt taken by more experienced officers. Danny's piles of files didn't have a single person over the age of thirty in them. She held her glass to her forehead as the reality of having a pack of child prodigies following her out into the field landed properly in her mind.

A technology-based, creative solutions soldier was a definite must, and a trained sniper to round them out from a distance.

Then she would have to deal with violent deaths like Kirsch's every damn day of her life. Danny drained her beer and motioned for another one. She wondered if she would be asked to investigate Carmilla, given that she was the reason Danny in particular was singled out for recruitment over other experienced people like Kirsch and the entirety of their respective groups.

On the bar, next to her new beer, her phone vibrated with a message from Laura.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Detective," her growl was low and the middle-aged man visibly paled. "Your name will not be published and I am literally offering to do your job for you. What is your problem with this arrangement?"

Detective Corben fiddled anxiously with the few remaining sugar packets after the woman's spirited flavouring of her coffee. The tiny woman had cornered him so effectively that he couldn't remember exactly how she had talked him into a dark corner of a local cafe. She had access to information about his case that was to be kept in the strictest confidence among the police force and she had made connections they needed the full background of the previous cases to make. "It's not just this particular case, Mrs Hollis."

She didn't wear a ring, but she appeared to be the honest type and the darkly clad woman walking next to her when she ambushed him was wearing a ring. They were holding hands with a level of comfort that Eddie Corben took years of marriage to get to with his own wife. The pesky journalist didn't flinch or correct him so he put that fishing expedition in the win column.

The 'dog in sight of a bone' expression that lit up her face, and his win suddenly seemed like almost nothing in comparison.

"This has happened before?" Mrs Hollis asked with disbelief overshadowing her shock. "Please, do tell."

Corben wished he was closer to retirement, then he would stand a chance of being randomly gunned down and wouldn't have to be having this conversation. "It's a strange case, alright? Very few people are willing to work it though we think this bastard comes out of his bolthole once per year or so."

The journalist rifled through her folder filled with paperwork, slipping a glossy photograph of a crowd out of the pile. Holding the picture up, she pointed out a specific face out of the crowd. "This bastard?"

"That is not in the evidence box," he pointed out dumbly, the familiar strong jaw and clear blue eyes staring calmly at the police attending the scene. "As far as we and every federal agency we have asked can tell, that man does not exist. He targets either one person or a small group, sends these letters, all handwritten, kills them, and disappears again."

"Any ideas on how he picks his targets?" Mrs Hollis examined the image one last time before tucking it back into her folder. His own notes on the case weren't as long as the folder implied hers were and he had been working the 'Merc' case for five years straight.

Detective Corben shifted uncomfortably underneath her dismissive gaze. Never before had he felt so bad at his job. "I understand that he was your friend and you seem to think this has something to do with, ghosts and goblins or whatever, but this is most likely a contract killer. A hired gun working for the highest bidder. Your boy had an enemy who really, really didn't like him, and that's what we know happened."

"You seem to think he's a ghost, not me," she countered coolly. Corben sent a prayer to this one's wife, that couldn't be fun for an entire relationship. "I happen to know you can exist while not leaving any kind of paper trail or evidence in a database somewhere."

He signalled the girl at the counter for another mug of coffee, capturing the sugar from Mrs Hollis' sweet tooth. "Oh yeah? How'd you figure that?"

People who were alive and running around in cities and towns in the modern age existed, they left a trace of themselves. Everyone had to eat, and everyone had some kind of social media. Bank accounts and any online presence eventually led to an official document. A birth certificate, a marriage license, passports, and all the other records most everyone accumulated throughout their lives. People couldn't just be ghosts any more.

This didn't bother Mrs Hollis. Corben reminded himself to ask what her given name was, it would speed up the full background check he was going to order along nicely.

"Detective, I am married to a three-hundred year old vampire while also being legally kind of de facto married to a Special Forces officer, I literally live with two entirely different types ghosts. This man could be anyone or anything, governments and longevity are equally good at erasing all traceable evidence of a person's existence," she explained without having to stop for thinking over her words. Detective Corben added checking whatever school this woman went to and a deep study on whichever debating team or public speaking competitions or whatever she was involved in. He got the sense that she had stood up to fight for something in her past.

Detective Eddie Corben was a 'normal' person. Spouse, kids, house, steady job that he only hated around once per week. Not bliss, not terrible, just average and normal. The word 'vampire' took a long while to settle properly in a mind not at all prepared to receive that kind of information.

On the other side of the secluded booth, Laura Hollis had every intention to wait it out as the straight-laced cop worked his way through the mass of information she just threw in his face. Besides, the coffee was pretty decent here, she thought while getting the barista's attention and pointing to her cup with a broad and hopefully thankful smile. Laura started debating with herself to pass the time. Would Detective Corben's 'normal-person' senses take offence to the vampire part or the two wives part first.

Both had their merits, though Laura had already primed him for the potential supernatural element to his long-running case which made the polyamory shoot into first place.

"You're married to a vampire in the army?"

Laura wasn't too proud to admit that her first instinct was to smash her sturdy mug over his head. The next thought that popped into her head was a little girl with vampire fangs, red hair, and toy gun in her hands. That one she shoved deep down until she was certain neither Danny nor Carmilla to divine it from her expression when she got back to their hotel room. It could wait until Danny wasn't taken away from them for months at a time while her own anxiety grew stronger and stronger with each day she spent away from the paper.

"He's either really old, already declared dead, or is working for someone powerful enough to vanish him from all official records without a trace," she greatly simplified for his benefit. Laura fished her phone out of her sensible purse to show Corben what she meant. "This is Danny, she's an unperson because of what her branch of the Special Forces deals with."

Detective Corben registered that the woman in the picture was not the surly one he had seen Mrs Hollis with earlier. He noted that the ginger one, this Danny, wasn't wearing a ring just like the woman sitting across from him. Mrs Hollis swiped her phone until a shockingly soft image of the one that he was presuming was the vampire tending to a herb garden.

"Carmilla was born and died over three centuries ago. You tell me if you keep an eye out for dead minor nobility that long after their 'suspicious disappearance' at a ball," Laura explained further, letting Detective Corben gape at her attractive partners for a few more moments out of pride more than any real need to gloat. "They are outside of your realm of information. Birth certificates either don't exist any more or have been redacted. As far as I know, there aren't any official marriage documents, though I am entitled to all kinds of Special Forces spousal benefits I don't remember agreeing to."

"You think he's intelligence?" Detective Corben tried to make sense of the increasingly complicated woman across from him. "Or some kind of ageless being. Maybe even a combination of both, somehow."

Laura was willing to work with what she was given. If she could make Greg work, nothing would ever be a challenge again. She was mildly terrified for the day her life went weird enough to involve magical pregnancies, especially with three wildly different targets for the bad luck to strike. The cop was at least intelligent and not trying to use an ancient evil or French people to try and kill her.

"I'm saying you watch too many movies," she clarified. "In my experience, this kind of thing is either something weird or at least something real corrupt."

Detective Corben pulled his phone from his hip, checking his most recent emails on the subject of the Merc. Chasing the formidable man once every year had turned the loosely connected local police all over Europe into a bunch of worn down veterans up against an enemy that could strike at any time, anywhere. The cold fear ran through each of the many detectives involved in the email chain. They all knew the Merc was as good as gone if they knew he was in their jurisdiction.

"Few people go to the police with stories about handwritten letters delivered by persons unknown, even fewer are believed when they do. If he's a ghost, of either kind, then we are helpless until he makes a mistake. There is no connection between his victims besides the letters, nor does he use the same methods for different incidents. Sometimes a gun, others arson, in this case, a real big knife," he laid it out for her.

Corben turned his phone so this little journalist could see the information. Two years previous, a family of five in a supposedly haunted house killed with precise bullets to the back of their heads. There was even a note at the bottom of the report that stated the haunting only got worse after the incident, a supposed fact provided by a local mystic or something.

"The Latin at the top of each letter isn't classified as relevant?"

"It's superstitious bullshit, trying to fake a religious angle where there isn't one," Corben argued like there was no room for further discussion.

"It's a message warning these people away from the unnatural, things like demons, ghosts, and-"

Corben watched her pale, the fear the silenced her passing in less time than it took him to fully notice it. "Vampires?"

Laura flipped through her folder with an adrenaline-fuelled determination. Flight was not a survival instinct she had, fight was all she knew how to do. "The first letter he sent Kirsch, presuming it is him and not someone else ordering him around, said something about brothers, didn't it?"

"Your friend was in a fraternity, that usually means brothers in life if not in blood," he tried to dissuade her from digging further into the case. Mrs Hollis was starting to sound more like a crusader rather than a reporter. The last thing Corben needed was a vigilante operating in his area. "The letters are supposed to force fear through either stalking or some kind of intense research regime that's rivals law enforcement background checks."

"Maybe you should run that level of checks and stalking on the victims. If you did, you'd know one of his brothers in life was a vampire. You would also have seen me coming a mile away instead of being caught jerking off on government time when you should have been actually looking into the fucking evidence you have in greater detail," she seethed. The barista arrived with both of their new coffees. The little journalist was so calm in her rage at him and his department that the woman didn't even notice she was pissed right off at first. When she did notice, she beat a hasty retreat. The barista showed more sense of self-preservation than Detective Corben himself.

"I have fifty homicides open back at the precinct, if you'd like to come shuffle my time better so I can go through all of them with a fine tooth comb as well," he hit back, rubbing his eyes and blindly reaching for his coffee. "Maybe I will send this on to Special Forces, make it their problem."

His eyes were closed causing him to completely miss her throwing back her coffee like it wasn't scalding hot and gathering her things with worrying speed.

"That would be excellent, thank you Detective Corben, it's been a pleasure."

When he opened his eyes she was throwing entirely too much money at the barista and walking out of the cafe without a glance back at him.

Detective Eddie Corben resolved to pass the case on to Special Forces for secondaru consideration. If Mrs Hollis wanted the Merc, then she could have him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll probably finish this in the day to get it out of the way since no one seems to like it much. I'll re-work the other two parts to this larger story once the western's done.


	5. Chapter 5

They fell into their bed as a pile, the strain of the week catching up like a house falling on their heads. Laura and Danny were out of it immediately, Laura barely getting her shoes off before nodding off to sleep. Carmilla held them as they slept. She wasn't tired. The week didn't have the same drain on her as it did them. The frat boy wasn't a friend to her, and she certainly didn't place much stock in their former little team at Silas.

Their naps were short-lived affairs, or perhaps not, Carmilla lost herself in absent-minded contemplations of nothing and everything all at once. Getting lost in being with her loves wasn't hard, she did it all the time.

When they were starting to show their first signs of waking, Carmilla slipped out of the bed, carefully ensuring that she didn't bring either of them into awareness just yet. They were easiest to hide from when groggy and the most likely to believe one of the dozens of lies she had come up with since they got married.

Hiding places for her stash were few and far between in the house she procured for them all. Danny and Laura rarely ventured up into her attic greenhouse, the humidity bothered them to no end. Things like that didn't worry your average vampire, a fact Carmilla took full advantage of at all times.

She crept along the upstairs hallway, keeping her ears trained on Laura and Danny's breathing patterns. The ladder to the attic came down silently after a monthly dosage of lubricant was faithfully added. Her own steps up the wooden rungs were subtle but still a risk. She would have poofed herself up there, but that would lead to questions of why she wasn't just taking the ladder.

The attic greenhouse was her own personal project that had nothing to do with her deep seeded desire to create something after so many decades helping Mother destroy people. Certainly not. The raised garden beds and potted plants were host to the widest variety of flowers and edibles she could find, a far cry from her little herb garden at Silas.

Carmilla winced at the memory of what her tomorrow looked like. Cleaning up after Mother's messes wasn't fun. On bad day, she could even find it in herself to throw some of the blame onto Laura as well. Tipping out the cutlery drawer then not sticking around for long to deal with the clean-up was the one great argument they had left. Carmilla was not dealing with Laura's brand new story to hunt down and pick apart until it threatened her wife's life. Not one moment sooner nor one moment after. Heading back to dear old Silas on the regular was more than enough torture for one little vampire to handle.

The plant came out of its pot with an easy regularity that soothed some of the budding worry blooming in her chest. The false bottom gave way without a single noise and she pulled her sealed medical bag out with less and less apprehension every time she had to do this.

The regime was so simple, an idiot could follow it. The needle went into her leg, and the accompanying pain was beginning to fell like an old friend. Best part of the thing was that it seemed to be working going by most of the testing she had done on herself. Venturing back to Silas wasn't entirely about picking up after Mother after all.

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

  
Danny accompanied Laura to work, she had business in town and Laura was only staying for the morning anyway. Carmilla had disappeared in the early hours of the morning, back to Silas to tend to the Board of Directors, her chosen interim Dean, and the endless mountain of paperwork the vampire could spend an entire decade battling through, and still be only halfway done.

Unofficially, Danny wasn't exactly welcome at Fortuitous Superstition after the drooling incident among her male employees. Laura tried not to get possessive, sometimes. If her wives decided that they didn't like it, she was ready and willing to quash the urge. She drew the line at her employees looking like they were about to start making moves on her wife.

Danny happily vaulting the front gate to the converted office wasn't helping matters at all. Laura happened to be discussing what coverage they were providing for a local werewolf offering wandering supernatural bodyguard services with Greg in the front room at the time. She watched every last one of the people in the room with her lose interest in their work to stare at the pretty army lady being more active in three seconds than they collectively were in a week.

Laura sighed, catching the attention of everyone in the room, they scurried away real fast when it sounded like their boss was in a firing mood.

"Hey Katherine!" Danny greeted with her usual exuberance for new people. Laura rolled her eyes on Carmilla's behalf. "How's your dog?"

Laura sighed again. "Positive view please Greg, I'll sic her on him if Mister Werewolf steps a toe out of line," she effectively finished her little meeting with Greg.

Laura didn't hear whatever Katherine said in reply to Danny, though she imagined it was gushing over what sort of adorable cuteness her dog had done this week. Danny vicariously owned many dogs, living with a large cat prevented them from most pet-ownership opportunities.

"That's not being nice to the werewolf," Greg tried to argue. Laura glared at him until he simpered away into his corner desk. "Positive article coming up."

Laura watched Danny evidently get bored of hearing dog stories and beeline for Laura's office at the back of the building. Laura glared once around the room at the few people still daring to encroach on her territory and followed Danny through the office.

Her office used to be the kitchen in the house pre-conversion. Danny was messing with her wood-burning stove leftover when Laura arrived.

"It works fine when it's cold, you don't need to tinker with everything," Laura announced, causing Danny to smack her head on the inside of the stove. "I'm buying you a helmet, for wearing all the time including the shower and in bed."

"Somehow not the weirdest thing you're into," Danny groaned while she clutched the back of her head. "Might be on par with the car thing you won't let me tell Carmilla about for some strange reason."

Laura wasn't impressed with the smug tone her wife took at the end there. "You know it's a height thing, and there is no way in Hell or Hogwarts that she hasn't spied in on us at least once. Secrets aren't a thing we can do, like ever."

Laura slid the lock home on her office door, wanting privacy more than anything in the world at that moment. "It has been so long since you were home long enough to visit me at work."

Danny remained completely distracted by her minor head wound, missing the serious bedroom eyes Laura was sending at her back. "Unless there's some kind international incident, I promise to never be gone for that long ever again."

She knew now that it was Danny, not Laura herself that was missing the mark in this kind of situation. They'd figured that Carmilla was the only one totally comfortable in all facets of her sexuality and asking for that kind of physical affection freely and clearly. That didn't make Danny's thick skull any easier to deal with on a day-to-day basis. "Danny, do you remember that time I told you my office has walls and a door so thin it's basically the direct opposite of soundproof?"

Danny froze. Laura took a long step toward her wife. "A lock that works, too. If I'm remembering correctly, it was so long ago," Danny switched tracks, faster than Laura generally gave her credit for. Danny turned and leaned against Laura's desk with her arms folded and an unimpressed look on her face. "Miracles will never cease."

"Do I get to visit your office?" Laura asked, unsettled by Danny's immediate dislike of her clearly brilliant idea. "Does it lock with a super not soundproof door?"

Laura was an only child with two affectionate wives, being turned down was a rare experience for and it would probably take another couple of years to outgrow. Danny's lips curled into a small smile. "It does not, I guess Carmilla and I will just have to content ourselves with visiting you here."

"You suck," Laura pouted, she could be smooth and subtle about what she wanted. It wasn't her fault that Carmilla and Danny shared the ability to see right through her immediately. "Maybe I've changed my mind."

Danny turned her head to examine to current clutter of stuff on top of Laura's desk, thoroughly amused at Laura's expense. "Yes, this a whim, that's how you've magically removed your laptop to a safe distance."

Laura decided that going on the offensive was the only way to go in this situation. She walked calmly to behind her desk, smugly aware of the blue eyes following her every move with interest, and sat down at her desk with a lazy air almost as good as Carmilla's.

"Alright then, up to you. Either we make Greg go fetch us an amazing lunch to share before I leave for the day," she offered, doing a poor job of seeming ambivalent to this particular option. "Or we leave a large stack of paperwork for him to re-file after we leave."

Danny turned around and placed her hands on the two largest piles of paper. She slid them from side to side, pretending to consider her the question. Laura waited patiently, trying to keep some of the control of the situation she had wrestled away from Danny.

"My office has a camera in it at all times, to ensure nothing untoward happens in an abuse of power, super creepy kind of way," Danny said, frowning. "I can actually do neither of your options, and you need to leave work now."

Laura felt herself tense without really noticing why. "Is there a threat to my office I don't know about?"

Danny shrugged, pushing both piles of paperwork off the desk. "No, but I need to get to mine, sadly. Or happily?"

"Has there been an international incident I don't know about?" Laura forced herself to ask, bravery coiling inside her to prepare for saying goodbye to Danny for another unknown and ungodly stretch of time. "You didn't rush over so I damn well hope not."

Danny brandished her phone like it would save her from whatever bad news she had to deliver to her wife. Laura made a mental note to pre-warn Carmilla surreptitiously that a storm would be heading home one way or another. "I have been called in, though it's just for a meeting then I'll be home before it gets dark, I promise."

Laura believed her, Danny so rarely had any reason to lie that her deception skills were non-existent at the best of times. "What kind of meeting?" Danny stared at her like Laura could explode into questions she couldn't answer at any given moment. "As your wife, ignore the files on Special Forces currently all over my office floor, some asshole officer came in and turned the place over."

"One where I have to declare exactly how much of my work I share with you, annoyingly. They're willing to let me pick my team while I'm on 'mental and emotional well-being' leave, and I argued that there's no way you or Fangs is letting me do that without reading over my shoulders constantly."

Brain stuttering to a standstill, Laura blinked without really seeing Danny properly. "You're getting your team?"

The grin bursting onto her lips was matched by the enthusiasm she showed diving into Danny's arms and kissing her quickly and frequently until Danny managed to get a firm hold on her wife. "I am as soon as we get you home and me to the base."

Letting her arms rest loosely around Danny's neck, Laura couldn't resist a few more pecks before pulling back. "Why don't I just come to the base too? You guys have a visiting area, right?"

Danny sighed, she was winning the day for so long there, and resigned herself to an onslaught of spouse-related comedy upon actually arriving to her meeting with the other relevant officers. "You just want a front-row seat to all the women in uniform on base," she accused light-heartedly.

"You've caught me in my most dastardly plan yet. You should arrest me and throw me in some deep, dark hole you people have on that big bad base of yours."

"Stop fishing, Hollis, we have a meeting to get to."

"Do you have any candidates in mind?" Laura asked while Danny patiently helped her pick up the folders she was officially not seeing. She did wonder where the heck Laura got her hands on so much information. Because it wasn't from Danny herself. "Anyone I would know?"

Danny sighed and put the folders down on Laura's desk possibly a bit too forcefully. Laura's attention snapped to her immediately, concern washing away to guilt as she figured what it sounded like she was asking. "Laura-"

"That's not what I meant," Laura rushed to defend her question, wincing at how she totally came across as asking that one thing she promised she wouldn't bring up again.

"Are you sure? Because I can explain my reasoning for the seventh time if you'd prefer?" Danny was beyond annoyance with this conversation. The tired frustration in her voice made Laura fix her desk faster, wanting to sooth it physically before she lodged her other foot in her mouth too.

"I meant like someone the paper has covered, nice werewolf bodyguard dude for example," she scrambled, admitting to herself that she might have meant exactly what it sounded like a little bit.

"I am sure LaFontaine is fantastic at the whole creature feature expert thing," Danny started, feeling the tension in her shoulders. There were a lot of things she was willing to compromise on with her wife. This was not one of them. "Our time at Silas made that more than clear."

"But you need someone willing to take orders," Laura finished the tired explanation. "And LaFontaine can't do that."

"Not from me they can't, no," Danny added carefully. The fact that she could never quite get along with the scientist was made worse by the incident with J.P. and Kirkland that the man in the machine decided was best in Danny's hands rather than LaFontaine's. "Also, bodyguard werewolf guy has a few outstanding criminal charges that amount to basically community service, but it's enough to disqualify him from the military."

Laura let out a breath and her lungs were grateful. "Do you have a file on Carmilla too?"

Danny shrugged, "me? No. Special Forces? Without a doubt."

"I'm going to set my crime team up with a full investigation to be done on Kirsch, down to re-treading the scene and interviewing absolutely everyone. Then we can go?"

Danny nodded and sprawled out in Laura's armchair to await her wife's power trip to be over.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

  
Laura had her crime division write up a truly scathing report on the ease they had getting in to and out of the crime scene. There was no way a decent police force would allow just anyone to go trampling through the scene of a murder without even stopping them for identification. She had to lean on them fairly heavily, they were unwilling to risk being arrested as they didn't have a wife who had perceived jurisdiction over the police in the suspicious death arena.

The bottom floor of her converted house of an office was a hive of activity as Laura arrived late, noting immediately that not only Greg was in hiding, but half of her staff had taken a day off. She rolled her eyes, one serial killer wasn't anything to fear when compared with all of the non-human dangers Laura knew were out there. As far as she could tell all the killer could do was survive a bullet wound.

Lots of people could walk away from being shot three times in the chest, right?

Laura sat in her office, blocking the rest of her team from her mind, and went over the crime scene photos for the tenth time. She was hoping that sleeping on the information would lead to some kind break in her total lack of theories.

The apartment was trashed, lamps shattered against walls and various makeshift weapons embedded in the drywall. Kirsch had put up a hell of a fight, though it didn't scream the clumsy but experienced fighting style knew the young man favoured. He didn't have the rigid form of competence Danny had developed over time, however the frantic struggle felt wrong to Laura. The cold efficiency of the killer didn't sit well with the sheer volume of weapons Kirsch must have attacked with.

Later, when she was wrapped in a blanket and shivering with unspent adrenaline, Laura would know he was exactly three inches taller than Danny and possessed all the quietly intimidating energy of Carmilla when she was so furious that the rage-filled calm set in.

Her office was the closest to the back door in the converted house, and she was the first to notice the biting scent of gasoline in the air. It flowed underneath her closed door and she didn't register the danger for four long seconds. After that, a lancing fear shot through her body, jolting her to her feet. Laura grabbed her messenger bag and stuffed her laptop and all the files regarding the murder into it. The puddle of gasoline came through the gap at the bottom of the door.

The pleasant smell of wood burning briefly dominated the painful sting of gasoline fumes. Laura waited for the sprinkler system to switch on, or for her staff to recognise the danger. The only window in her office had an excellent view of the backyard. A flicker of bright light was the last thing she saw clearly.

The spark became an inferno instantaneously, the dry grass and trees went up from both sides of the yard at once. The solid back door gave an almighty crack as the heat from the fires split it down the middle. Laura didn't know where to go, out the window would lead to a wall of fire and out the door would involve literally stepping through a gasoline puddle that was seconds away from being a second wall of fire.

To stay where she was would mean suffocation if she didn't burn alive.

Laura could move fast when the situation required it, and the spike in adrenaline shifted her into high gear without a moment to stop and think on her options some more. A person burned alive left a distinctive corpse that Laura had personally seen three different times during her time at Silas, it wasn't how she wanted to go.

Crossing her office, she threw the door open and darted through the rush of hot air with her eyes closed and her head down. The heat blasted her. The fumes sent her light-headed. Laura turned to the right and ran for the front of the office. The sprinkler system must have been disabled. Laura knew the manual override was outside. Had to get there.

The flash of fire behind her licked at her heels. Gasoline flaring up as she ran. Greg side-stepped her, showing more agility than she'd ever seen on the man. People weren't quite to the door yet, Laura sliding through easily. She slid on her knees across their modest lawn and scrambled around in the grass for the bright red manual valve for the sprinkler system Danny insisted on being installed. Laura was never hearing the end of this. She heard the water hiss on.

Screams were coming from inside her office. One of her interns came flying out of the building with her phone pressed to her ear. Water pelted down inside the office, running out of the wide open front door. Laura wondered how much it would take to fix. Dropping her stuff safely against the fence, Laura palmed her phone off to the intern with instructions to call both of her wives until one of them answered.

The flicker of light was from one of those metal long-life lighters that Danny insisted on carrying everywhere. Someone had to have done that personally. Laura took a fortifying breath, coughed up some ash and made her way up the space in between the converted office and the residential home next door.

The wave of hot air got worse and worse the closer she got to the backyard,, but that was where she saw what might have been a man with a lighter, so that's where Laura Hollis was going.

Laura felt her father cringe with fear from hundreds of miles away.

The fire was blazing away in the backyard, trees alight and crumbling under the intensity of the blaze. The man was just standing in the middle of it.

His clothes were on fire. The hair on his head oddly wasn't. The man didn't seem to notice he was still in the fire he set.

The hard plastic petrol can was sitting at his feet, melting under the heat. A large oil drum was rolled over in front of him, one of his boot-clad feet perched on top. He made eye contact with Laura then kicked the drum forward.

The drum smashed into the back door with a heavy bang, like it was full. Laura didn't have time to consider the remarkable strength it would take to send something that weighty that far that fast.

A split second later, Laura figured the drum was full of petrol too.

Then it exploded.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

The building had to be gutted. Only the smoke stained stone of the facade would remain intact once the fire department was done with the building. They were recommending pulling the whole thing down and starting again. Carmilla stepped in and told them in perfect clarity that pulling down her wife's second home might just be punishable by exsanguination.

The building stood.

The woman who paper owned it? Not so much.

Laura Hollis did not do hospitals well. Whenever she thought about her appendix, she did so with a stern warning that it was not to get infected because she wasn't submitting to nearly a week in a hospital bed willingly.

She did not inform Danny or Carmilla of this. They would lose their damn minds.

The second degree burns and broken ribs justified a strong mix of painkilling drugs. Laura's mind wasn't exactly in its most aware state.

She came to that night. After the top floor collapsed, Laura's unconscious body was cocooned by debris from the explosion and low enough that the smoke barely got into her lungs. The burns were from heat alone rather than the vicious lick of flames. The doctors were unanimously amazed by how little she had been injured and the hot gossip running around the elderly inhabitants of the stroke ward said an angel was watching on her shoulder.

When Laura woke up, the world was fuzzy and Danny was doing freaking paperwork while her wife was in a hospital bed.

"Seriously?" Laura croaked out. She recoiled as far as her stiff neck and throbbing chest would allow at the sound of her own voice. Danny's head snapped up and a wild grin spread to light up her entire face. She heard a muffled conversation just outside the doors of the room she was sharing with three other injured idiots and picked up on the lower tones Carmilla liked to use when she was doing adult stuff of all kinds.

"You weren't exactly great company," her wife defended her entertainment decisions gamely through the worried tension coiling in her body. "They want me back on base as soon as possible and I've still only got half a team."

Laura glanced down to see a canvas bag packed with serious looking folders that each held the qualifications and biographies of potential Special Forces recruits. Danny had another bag filled with ones that Laura guessed were done and exactly one sitting closed next to the one she was currently working through.

"Found another one?" Laura wanted to talk about anything but her voice was coming out wrong.

Logically, she knew it was the burning torment of the smoke. It could be permanent. It could kill her even as she felt far too good for escaping a burning building.

Danny let her have the delay, Carmilla could hear them perfectly well and would have a medical professional of some kind in the room faster than Laura could worm her way out of potentially hearing that a longer hospital stay was in her immediate future.

"Tech guy, big too," Danny surmised her latest choice with the concise summations the other absurdly young officers liked to use. Anything to not be scrutinised by those with grey hair and lines of experience on their faces. "Alex Acone, from somewhere viking-y."

Danny frowned and shuffled through the folder that lay set aside until she found his most basic information.

"That a technical term?" Carmilla quipped as she checked the other three beds for sudden fire-bombing men to hurt Laura some more. "They'll release you in the morning if you can pass a breathing test. You woke up just in time to slot into the end of the specialist's rounds for the night."

Carmilla came to sit on the arm of Danny's chair, leaning across the back and wrapping her arms around Danny for support. Laura wanted to join the pile, suddenly desperate to feel them close to her. The rush of her blood through her ears told her that she wasn't getting away from the flames unscathed, physically or mentally.

"There's been no sight of him anywhere since the attack," Danny provided when Laura's chest started to rise and fall a little faster.

"I've got some Silas business at the end of the week, but I'm going to shadow you until then," Carmilla stated. Laura wondered if her wife knew she had a totally different voice for when she was telling rather than asking. Danny certainly didn't ever notice it.

"How long have I been in here?" Laura had to really think to remember what day it was when her paper came crashing down in flames. "It was Tuesday, right?"

Danny leaned forward to catch a glimpse of the clock mounted on the wall behind Carmilla. "It is still Tuesday for another ten minutes."

"They fire fighters said you were stupidly lucky the trees and fencing fell the way they did," Carmilla quoted them more or less accurately. Laura hummed to figure out if it was her chest or her throat that hurt. It was predictably both.

"When can I leave?"

Danny let her head fall back onto Carmilla's arm while the vampire laughed under her breath.

"Tomorrow if your lungs come back clear," an overly happy doctor answered, striding into the room like they weren't ten minutes from the end of their shift.

Laura perked up and decided she could do without speaking properly for a while if that was the worst thing to come out of the attack.

Things to do, paper to re-build, staff to check on.

No time to be sitting around in hospital.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

  
Geras had seven different newspapers delivered to his apartment each morning, eleven on Sundays, and he spent the slow periods of his working day methodically reading through all of them. When he got home each night, twelve evening edition papers were waiting on his welcome mat for him to read throughout his evening meal. He hadn't finished his dinner before it went cold since he moved into the sleepy little town.

He added another newspaper to his Sunday roster, Miss Hollis was a highly talkative client and her marriage vows took so long that he got more information out of her in one night that the rest of the population had managed over the following ten months. The subject matter was of interest to him, and no doubt to her clearly a vampire wife, and the young woman had a knack for hiring young talent that his other publications could take to heart.

The larger papers, measuring their parent companies in the billions, didn't cover the most interesting story of the day in his opinion. He had read Miss, or was it Mrs now, Hollis' short obituary for a man who was clearly a friend, and avidly checked through other sources for information that would lead her to believe it wasn't exactly a regular homicide.

It was Wednesday when he finally found the evidence Hollis was no doubt unable to collect or connect properly for obvious reasons. The smaller, more local publications were fiercely protective of each other, regardless of content or political differences. It didn't matter, when one of them was hurt, the others were there in support immediately. All four of his daily papers reported on the clear case of arson that was carried out on Hollis and her staff.

Their descriptions led him to his heavy cabinets full of files on all manner of people and monsters he'd come across in his rather extended lifetime. So many files matched the limited information he had collected over the decades. Geras considered going out into the field to get himself a few more data points, he even had his coat halfway on when his gleaming silver work mobile phone rang.

The woman whom he had chosen at random to work for when he arrived in town was a kind boss and only called him during his off-hours if a customer was requesting him specifically. Geras would be a fool among his own kind if he didn't believe in Fate, and thanked whoever was listening that Miss/Mrs Hollis had stumbled into the store at the exact moment he had decided to gather more information.

The walk back to work was made easy by the slight chill of the night air. The soft streetlights gave the town a warmth that fought off the cold and brought a smile to his face.

Hollis was alone this time. When she came in for her German wedding vows, the soldier and the vampire were stationed like sentries of either side of the diminutive woman. Her leg jumped up and down with nervous energy and she couldn't decide what to do with her hands, playing with her hair before fiddling with her phone. Geras stood outside the parlour and observed the woman who escaped a blazing building practically unscathed and decided the best thing to do with her time the very next week was get another tattoo. It wasn't the strangest behaviour he'd ever seen, but the lack of wives with her did shock him.

They didn't seem like the types to let their partner out alone after an apparent attempt on her life. Geras concluded that Miss/Mrs Hollis had some kind of hold on both of them that the girl probably didn't quite recognise for what it was just yet. He wasn't going to be the one to tell her, if the time-weary vampire hadn't already.

Hollis' attention snapped to him as the little bell above the door made that awful high-pitched jingling noise he so hated. She wasn't startled, nor panicking like a deer in headlights, Hollis was merely aware of her surroundings and had a keen sense for danger. Geras wondered if he should reconsider checking out the regular video journals the woman had kept throughout her time at university, they might have more insight into the making of this fascinating creature before him.

"One moment, Miss Hollis," he greeted with his warmest smile, faltering as she frowned in response.

"'Mrs', I'm more married than most people," she corrected him with a scratch in her voice. Smoke inhalation, he presumed, or perhaps just a rough week that drained her of all the energy she previously had to spare. "There's been a lot of shouting recently."

Geras kept his smile affixed, trying to convey sympathy non-verbally. Mrs Hollis watched him with a renewed interest that wasn't present the night they met. He wanted to put that down to her partners' being absent, most people he met were wildly different depending on the company they were with at any given time. He took his time hanging his coat and hat, then exchanging pleasantries with his boss before he returned to stand behind his art in their example displays. Learning to excel at this kind of art took longer than most of his varied skills, but it was one of the more rewarding jobs he'd ever taken.

"How can I help you tonight, Mrs Hollis?"

She rose from the comfortable seating in their little waiting area and slowly wandered over, taking in the art on every surface inside the building as if it was her first time in the building. "I have a specific idea but I'm not sure how I want it to look," she started, hitting every last one of his new nerves as a tattoo artist. "I mean, I don't know how to translate it into something that would look good as a tattoo.”

That was better, not great, but better.

"I will see what I can do. No spouses tonight?" Geras queried, casting a wide net for information. Let her come to him. "It's a fine night for little vampires to be out and about."

If she was shocked by his deduction, Mrs Hollis didn't show it. "She's off on family matters," she explained, staring at his designs rather than him as she leaned against the cool glass of the counter. "The other one's probably going back to work in the morning, I made her turn in."

"The 'belongs on a battlefield' Mrs Hollis, the tall one?" An easy interrogation was rare, Geras wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Mrs Hollis snorted and smiled fondly.

"Pretty sure she prefers 'Major Hollis'," she told him, the scratch slightly dissipating the longer she spoke. Geras thought back to the night he saw the woman he thought was human. He could have sworn she was roughly Mrs Hollis' age, not nearly old enough to be in such an advanced position in a modern army. "We lost someone a few weeks ago, and he was closer to her than he was to me, I thought I'd let her grieve in peace for a few hours."

"What's your idea?" Geras prompted her back to her reason for showing up. He could see her walls starting to build and stopped construction with distraction. "I promise white tattoos do not look as cool as you think they will with your complexion."

Mrs Hollis laughed, it was short and sweet. "No, nothing like that. I want a constellation of stars on my arm," she said, pointing to the very top of her right arm, practically on her shoulder. "I just can't quite picture how to make it more than just a collection of dots."

Geras frowned in thought for a few moments, grabbing his sketchpad and a pencil while he considered the options. "We could connect them with a broken line in a lighter shade, or perhaps place them on a darker background, midnight blue maybe?"

He started to shade in a solid background before pausing to look up at Mrs Hollis' awed expression.

"Oh, I should ask which constellation, might help with planning," he added, keeping his warm smile firmly in place. He dragged his fingers through his distinguished salt and pepper hair, forcing the rising blush on his cheeks. "We could do the constellation with what it's supposed to be done around it, like the ram of Aries?"

"Orion," Mrs Hollis whispered, but his old ears picked it up. Geras set to work from memory, Mrs Hollis setting him with a suspicious glare at the ease he drew up a correct representation of the constellation. The blush he was fighting finally won.

"Had a brief affair with astronomy in my youth," he answered her unasked question smoothly. Geras had a wildly varied youth that seemed to change depending on whichever of his customers you asked. "Always something beautiful in the night sky."

A free smile bloomed on Mrs Hollis' face, one he hadn't seen since her first session. "Carm, the vampire, she has the same outlook on the world. I can never tell if it's a philosophical thing or a brooding loner thing."

"Hopeless romantic, perhaps?" Geras challenged, remembering the scores of tragic loner vampires he had come across. He quickly finished his three options, with a very rudimentary representation of Orion himself for the third. "I believe all three of these are more than doable, though the midnight background is what I would go with if this isn't the only one I was going to get."

"Looking for repeat business, Mr Geras?"

"It's just Geras, wandering vagabond style, very hip with the youth," he justified to side-step any further questioning on the subject. He considered taking a last name, but couldn't be bothered with the amount of paperwork required. Mrs Hollis seemed to take it a face value, which just made her all the more fascinating.

"If we're going to be spending however long it takes to put the galaxy on my arm, then you should call me Laura," she replied, sticking her hand out for him to shake.

Geras cheered internally as he took her hand. A window into her mind had been cracked open.

Information just got that much closer.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

  
The warmth surrounding her was so nice she wanted to stay asleep forever.

Carmilla's eyes opened against her will, the sun blinding her temporarily. When her vision cleared she saw the scavenger birds circling overhead and felt the still-warm touch of human contact on her right arm, exactly where it was before she was jarred into awareness.

Blood hung in the air like a fine morning mist, souls screaming to safer ground went whizzing by her ears, and her wife still had her dumb giant hand laying on Carmilla's stomach like she was going to bring up kids any day now.

Carmilla shook her head and sat up, noting with mounting horror that Danny's hand didn't twitch and grab for her like it normally did when she moved too suddenly in bed. Her dinner rushed to escape her stomach as she was met with dozens of bodies laid out upon a grass field stained red.

Vaulting to her feet, Carmilla turned to see her wife with claw marks shredded through the front of her reinforced uniform, blood pooling in the gashes. The material was so sturdy that Carmilla wished to never, ever come across whichever beastie had managed to get its claws through it and to Danny's soft flesh and breakable bones underneath.

She could feel the man hunting through the battlefield yet again. Carmilla turned away from the bodies, sickening herself for growing complacent with the weight her dead fucking wife deserved and locked on to the man gleefully picking his way through the scores of other dead littering the field.

He was taller than Danny, broader, and wholly unconcerned with how out in the open his looting was. But then, as Carmilla got a better look at his motions as he bent at each human body, and only the human ones, he wasn't exactly taking anything. Carmilla stumbled closer to him, intent on ripping his throat out.

She didn't get her chance.

The man's body snapped to attention and he turned about in search of something none of Carmilla's enhanced senses were picking up. The man took off fast for a human, yet slow for a vampire.

Danny's body was warm this time. Like she was still viable for those words Mother left Carmilla with. Words that would stop this kind of pain in its tracks. Danny could live forever, they could be together. Carmilla would get to stop worrying about her wife turning thirty while she was only just breaking through twenty with a massive amount of help.

The future laid out for her and her wife was a hollow one that would leave her alone. Laura would kill her if she went against Danny's wishes to not be a vampire. After, of course, Danny herself tore herself to pieces rather than being like her.

Carmilla remembered the conversation and remembered that this image was why she felt compelled to ask. If the whole military thing ended violently or if Laura's work made her a bright target for attacks such as arson, could Carmilla really let them go if it was possible to save either of them?

As she held out her shaking hand over the lifeless form of her wife, Carmilla knew exactly what she would do when the time came.

Losing them wasn't an option.


End file.
